Texollini's Relies on Sequel: The Right Tool for System i Data Access

All athletes understand challenge— whether it’s finishing the last mile of a marathon, performing a dance on opening night, or swimming the final laps of a relay. Good athletes know what it takes to be successful in the face of that challenge: hard work and the right tools for the job, including the proper clothing. While the average person might not know the difference between poorly made and high-quality sportswear, Texollini is widely recognized as an expert in the area of knitting stretch fabrics used to manufacture sportswear, activewear, performance wear, intimate apparel, and swimwear.

Founded in 1989 in California, Texollini has grown to be the largest knitting specialist for stretch fabrics west of the Mississippi. This process isn’t without its own challenges. The knitting of fabric that contains stretch yarns requires expert technology, special conditions, consistently clean machinery, and constant maintenance over and above the standards of the textile industry. Texollini accomplishes this by using the right tools—the best raw materials, quality control methods, and state-of-the-art equipment for knitting, dyeing, finishing, and printing. Since its inception, Texollini has continually stepped up to its challenges. It continues to be among the most technologically advanced knitting mills and has built a reputation as a leader in innovation and quality.

“Sequel is just a simple, fast way of getting the information users need.”

One of the day-to-day challenges faced by Texollini was how to deal with its System i data. Texollini found the right tool for these tasks in Sequel Data Access, the Fortra business intelligence solution for the IBM® System i.™ Dmitry Konstantinovsky, MIS Manager at Texollini, explains why Sequel is the right solution for them. “The purchasing, inventory, and billing software we use is from TIM Datatex, which is one of the most used textile packages on the System i. We use Sequel as a supplement to that software. There are two of us who design Sequel views and reports and we support over 50 users. With Sequel, we can create reports, put them on menus, and the users relies on Sequel— the right tool for system data access can run them when they need to. Sequel is just a simple, fast way of getting the information users need.”

Before Sequel, accessing information from regular System i reports could be challenging for some users. Now sorting data, finding specific information, updating fields, and formatting the reports are all made easier with Sequel. Dmitry says, “Sequel makes the process of creating reports much easier for us. The run-time prompting is very versatile and allows users to prompt for date ranges, warehouses, production orders, even how the data will be sorted. With Sequel, there’s no need for technical knowledge, no need to know how to write programs. Users can find and access information quickly and easily. Sequel’s update command is also very useful. We can use data in one file to update a field in another file without writing a program. It saves time.

“Another way we save time is by using Sequel to do file extracts. We build Sequel views that extract data from our transaction files. Sometimes we summarize the data. Our users then run their reports from the extracted database. This greatly improves performance. For example, we may join the inventory transaction file to the item master file. We have a lot of flexibility, and can group or summarize the data in various ways. We can also select out certain records. The CASE function lets us check the value in a field and do the appropriate calculation. This gives us good conditional processing when building the file extracts.”

Sequel also helps Texollini work with dates within their data files. Dmitry describes how they use the Convert Date function. “Dates are stored in our files as 8-byte packed fields in a year/month/day format. The Sequel Convert Date function allows us to easily convert these dates to date data types. Now we can do date arithmetic just by subtracting the converted dates. Sequel calculates the number of days between the order date and the ship date. Then, Sequel summarizes the data and calculates the average number of days by year, customer, sales rep…basically any way we want.” Because Sequel performs these types of functions specific to the users’ needs, they can analyze their data more easily.

Just as athletes can rely on sportswear made from Texollini fabric, users of System i data can have confidence that Sequel is the right tool for their tasks. Sequel steps up to the challenge at Texollini to deliver information users need—by formatting reports, updating fields, extracting files, converting dates, and more. As long as Texollini relies on Sequel to help with its System i data, the company can be sure that it’s well equipped to provide users with the information they need when they need it.