Robot/TRANSFORM Pushes The Envelope Out Of The Way For Thermwell

Was there anything better than getting a present in the mail when you were a kid? A chemistry set. A new doll. Even if it was a plaid turtleneck from Grandma and Grandpa in North Dakota, it was still fun to see your name in print and then tear open the box.

How soon we forget. Today, waiting for anything seems ludicrous. We scoff at the thought of using snail mail unless we have to. But, until there is an alternative, that’s what we do. We wait. And that’s what the sales reps at Thermwell Products were doing. They had to wait for invoices stuck in the mail. When reps have to wait for invoices, customer service suffers. Thermwell turned to Robot/TRANSFORM,® Help/Systems’ OS/400-outputto- PDF conversion package, to solve the waiting problem. Thermwell sells over 2

Thermwell sells over 2,300 products, including Frost King brand insulation and weather stripping products, to consumers all over the world. They have satellite offices and manufacturing and distribution facilities throughout the United States.

The company has used Robot/SCHEDULE,® Help/ Systems’ job scheduler and automatic computer operator, since 1996. When they heard Help/Systems was about to introduce Robot/TRANSFORM, Thermwell had it quick-shipped and was one of the first companies to use it.

Thermwell uses a Robot/SCHEDULE job to merge sales data with the EZ Print electronic forms package from ACom to create their invoices. They used to print an extra copy of each invoice and then mail them to each sales rep. In some cases, reps were waiting more than two weeks for invoices.

Now, Robot/TRANSFORM automatically converts the invoices into Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files, natively on the iSeries. Thermwell e-mails them to the sales reps immediately after they’re created. Jeffrey Adler, Vice President of Information Services at Thermwell, explains, “The job that creates the sales reps’ copies runs at 4:00 a.m. every Sunday. I don’t know how many spooled files or invoices there are going to be that week. Rather than playing games, we just run that job. Once the job ends, Robot/TRANSFORM goes out and starts looking for spooled files that contain certain user data, for example, a salesperson code. Those are the invoices. It converts those files to PDF and we go ahead and e-mail them to the appropriate sales people.

“We were looking at other solutions for this problem, and quite frankly, it was difficult to find. We used another product to convert spooled files to PDF but that worked with everything but EZ Print spooled files. The cost of using the other solution was more than Robot/TRANSFORM. In our environment, Robot/TRANSFORM was less expensive and it did more. It has more features, functions, and it cost less money.”

Jeffrey was happy to solve the waiting problem. And what about the sales reps? Are they happy now that their invoices for the week are sitting in their Inbox when they log on Monday morning? Jeffrey offers this assessment: “Sales people are funny. They only tell us when there’s a problem. They haven’t talked to me about invoices in six months. So, that tells me there are no problems.” We can assume the sales reps are happy, too.