If you’re a beer drinker in the U.K., there’s a good chance that Asheware Computing’s creative use of Visual DataFlex and Embedded SQL had a hand in getting your favorite brew delivered to your local pub.

Asheware, located in Etwall, Derby, is a small applications development firm serving U.K. based clients, including several who are national players in their sector in vertical markets such as the brewing, transportation, engineering, publishing, and healthcare industries. Clients include Carlsberg Tetley, Everards and Fullers among brewers, PJB pharmaceutical publishers, Nottingham City Transport, and the National Health Service.

Asheware’s largest application calculates distribution efficiency and draymen’s (keg deliverymen) wages for Carlsberg Tetley, one of the best known brands in Britain. It serves 12 depots nationwide employing about 800 draymen and servicing about 30,000 outlets, and has been in continuous development for about a decade.

Ivor Smith, Asheware’s "Director, Programmer & Dogsbody", has extensive experience developing DataFlex applications. "We have been with DataFlex since 1986 when it was uniquely unaffected by operating system," Smith said. "We currently use various DataFlex revisions from character-mode DataFlex 3.1 through Visual DataFlex 9."

Smith offers this down-to-earth advice for maintaining good client relations: "We only work for our customers if they pay us, and they only use us if we save them money."

Asheware’s recent work with Embedded SQL involved their application at Everards Brewery in Leicester, one of the biggest independent brewers in the U.K. Everards currently uses an accounts system called Brewmaster, which has a telesales component.

Smith says that about 10 years ago, Asheware arranged to take details of Everards’ orders from a "csv transfer file", which was achieved by using a file-locking system that Asheware devised and a recurrent read procedure running in background so as to be invisible to the operators. Asheware’s application then plans the allocation of orders to the fleet of trucks (or drays, as they are called in the industry), and prints the delivery notes from which the drivers worked using a mix of a Visual DataFlex 8.2 app and a legacy DataFlex 3.1b system, to bring the all-important brew to the people.

The Brewmaster system is currently being upgraded and now uses MS-SQL Server files. Asheware was asked to help Everards avoid the cost of adding a revision to the file export from Brewmaster to the cost of the upgrade. The changeover had to be seamless - as Smith notes, "Draymen and beer-drinkers are not philosophical about software malfunction."

"We had been moving gradually to Visual DataFlex from the legacy procedural programs," he said. "One of the great unsung virtues of the VDF development tool is the way that it can accommodate several different front ends working on the same data files - simultaneously. We decided to install the SQL driver and to read the Brewmaster order files directly. This was not as simple as we expected, but we had effective help from our friends at ASCKEY Data Services with getting the .ini files set up."

Smith said that Asheware wished to avoid "unnecessary innovation" while the Brewmaster upgrade was in progress, so they decided to translate the Brewmaster data into DataFlex files so that they could use the unchanged planning and print routines during the transition.

"With using straight VDF program code, we had performance problems with MS-SQL in the company’s ’stress testing sessions’," he said. "So we took the documentation on Embedded SQL that came with VDF, and by dint of judicious copying and pasting, incorporated the appropriate SQL commands in our data retrieval programs. There was a massive drop in network traffic and suddenly our component, which frankly does more work than any other, became the one to keep up with. We were actually surprised how easy it was."

Smith also has high praise for his IT colleagues at the client’s site. "A word is due to the IT team at Everards, perhaps the best we deal with. They were participative, tolerant and above all clear about what they wanted. With their help and collaboration we did all this without having any SQL files on our development machine.

Says Smith, "Sometimes, it does what it says on the can!"

Ivor Smith and Asheware Computing Ltd. can be contacted via e-mail at asheware@btopenworld.com.

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