Client Overview
GEOMATEC Co., Ltd. is a publicly held company headquartered in Yokohama, Japan that manufactures and distributes thin-film coating products widely used in flat panel displays (substrates for liquid crystal displays, EL displays, and touch panels) and components for optical devices. The client is listed with JASDAQ and trusted as an expert in the thin-film coating industry. It is expanding its business partnerships with various major electronics manufacturerers that develop medical devices and automobile components.
GEOMATEC initially decided to utilize IBM Lotus Notes and Domino in 1996 for messaging. In their early days, the company implemented some packaged application offerings that were available in Japan. However, to meet their own business requirements, they started developing their own applications in 2007. Since then, they have developed business applications year after year. The corporation currently offers Notes applications to around 350 users. They have developed many custom workflow applications such as daily sales reports, expenses, and so on, and they use document links in mail very frequently.
“Notes Domino in our organization has been managed by a small group of staff: a developer and two administrators. We started Notes as a distributed system using database replications, but they are all consolidated into an AIX server now after a few upgrade projects. We are running Notes Domino with the latest version, which is 9.0.1,” said Kazuo Tamura of the System Development Department at GEOMATEC. “We are committed to Notes and Domino in the future as well.”
Business Challenge
According to the latest corporate financial report to the public, some of GEOMATEC’s business challenges are to share business information with employees more effectively and to speed up decision-making processes. Notes and Domino itself has helped the company to more effectively share business information with employees. Additionally, the deployment of corporate smartphones and tablets to the sales and management teams so they can access emails on the go has also helped with this challenge.
GEOMATEC has a lot of legacy applications where document links in mail notify staff on the workflow. The remaining business challenge was accessing business data in Notes databases on the fly in order for staff to make quick decisions. With this in mind, they began to consider which databases should be converted to the web.
Understanding GEOMATEC’s Domino Environment
“Managing Domino on the AIX server is very sensitive,” said Kazuo Tamura. Because AIX’s hardware disk is expensive, the company cannot invest in additional disk space easily. The client wanted to monitor databases daily so they could remove unused databases in the production environment. However, Domino’s standard functionalities wouldn’t provide sufficient information for this. They were unable to figure out who accessed what. There was “noise” in the statistics Domino provided to them such as access counts from replication activity. And, hypothetically, even if a database was less used, they couldn’t retire it without having end users’ feedback or knowing their needs. The client felt it was important to know who frequently accessed the database in order to understand what the future of the database should be.
Prioritization for the Web
The developers began to transform their development skills from traditional Notes development to XPages web development. They predicted that the more complex the database design, the more difficult it would be to convert to the web. They planned to start with simple database designs then expand to more complex applications as they increased their web skills. Even so, they had difficulty investigating entire database designs with certain criteria and found it mostly impossible before implementing Teamstudio Adviser.
The Teamstudio Solution
After a Teamstudio Adviser demo with a member of Teamstudio’s sales team, they were confident that this tool could tell them the best path forward for each database. They decided to implement this solution.
Results
“We found the Guidance Module to be extremely useful because it brings together data from all the other modules to make a recommendation on a forward path for each application. If we took feedback from end users and set the Business Value properly, Adviser provided a perfect strategy for our Domino assets. I can’t imagine we could achieve this without Adviser. Moreover, the information Adviser provides is updated on a daily basis to prevent us from seeing outdated information,” said Kazuo Tamura.