David Haythornthwaite wears a number of hats as Administration Manager for clothing manufacturer Traditional Weatherwear Ltd., makers of the traditional (and now world famous) Mackintosh raincoat that is part of the portfolio of many top design houses in Europe and America. Says Scotland Office Minister Brian Wilson about the Cumbernauld based company, "Traditional Weatherwear has, with its Mackintosh label, turned the traditional raincoat into a cutting-edge top fashion garment."

Responsible for all of the company's IT, health & safety, and other systems and projects in general that the 110-employee company relies upon to stay on the cutting edge in the highly competitive clothing and textiles business, Mr. Haythornthwaite has gained a great appreciation for Visual DataFlex's RAD toolset features combined with the power of the DataFlex language.

"Using Visual DataFlex has completely transformed our business," Mr. Haythornthwaite says. "Prior to using Visual DataFlex we were running our clothing business using a standard order processing package from our accounts package, and frankly, it did not do the job."

Mr. Haythornthwaite says that Visual DataFlex's high level tools enable him, as a businessman, to design complicated database models and data entry tools in a quick and intuitive way, ultimately building up a complete set of company controls that enable the company to sell their clothing products to their customers worldwide.

"I am basically a businessman who learned VDF in order to help the management team to run the business," he says. "Where VDF scored over other database systems is that I can build the database and entry forms on a visual 'point and shoot' basis, but if a particularly difficult data requirement is encountered, with a little more effort, I can use the very comprehensive VDF programming language to do the tasks that other databases simply would not do. VDF commands interact with the data and I do not have to worry about data storage. VDF takes care of it for me."

Recent business challenges that Traditional Weatherwear has tackled with their Visual DataFlex applications include cutting manufacturing costs and throughput time, implementing a better delivery schedule, providing Bill of Materials and Cost of Sales analyses, Works Study (time & motion) administration, individual operator performance analysis, organization of costings, and more. Plus, it must all be available and useable from more than one site.

"All programs are fully multi-user, and we use the central data from two sites using Terminal server," Mr. Haythornthwaite says. The system is designed for 20 concurrent users, but "everyone in the business - the whole workforce - is affected by Visual DataFlex. Our staff find the programs easy to use, and they continually sing the praises of VDF!"

The variety of business processes that Traditional Weatherwear relies on their Visual DataFlex 8.3 applications to handle today demonstrates the value that the company has realized by utilizing the DataFlex and VDF frameworks through the years.

"Some of the programming ideas were started in my own company 15 or so years ago, when I was working in character mode with DataFlex 2.3," says Mr. Haythornthwaite. "The current VDF 8.3 system has grown up over the past 18 months whilst running our business."

Over a period of time, Traditional Weatherwear's use of VDF has grown to control, costings, stock control, fabric stock and requirements, order processing and acknowledgement creation, order analysis and job sheet creation, factory loading and planning, garment ticket and works docket creation, stocktaking valuation, invoicing and invoice analysis, work study data, purchase ordering, and many more operations.

The applications are currently running on a variety of platforms including Windows NT and some Windows 95 workstations, with Windows NT and 2000 Servers. Mr. Haythornthwaite says he's also considering deploying Pervasive.SQL to take advantage of its more reliable client-server architecture when deploying on WinNT servers. In addition, other third-party software has been integrated with the VDF applications to maximize the company's IT environment, including Sage (UK) Limited's Line 100 accountancy software and StarZen's Virtual Print Engine for VDF.

Says Mr. Haythornthwaite, "All systems are aware of each other. Orders are tied to costings and automatically update fabric requirement data. By tying data together in this way we have full interaction between systems and can automatically know, for example, the cost of each invoice, promoting profit analysis and maximization. We link to our accounts package using the ODBC drivers from Data Access and our Sage accountancy package."

The company's deployed Virtual Print Engine from Ideal Software uses StarZen's VDF Report Classes to create an "excellent" reporting tool with a wizard right in the VDF IDE. The reporting tool provides complete flexibility to use graphics in reports and the ability to manipulate data at the same time as reporting it, or to report on data manipulation itself. The company produces their own "stationary" such as order acknowledgements or invoice forms using three different company logos depending on the application. They also print on to laser labels for garment tickets and on to much smaller labels for wage payment vouchers in the works study system, as well as having the capability to print bar codes.

Mr. Haythornthwaite says that by careful database design and producing the right reports for each department, the company's line managers can now see the order data in the best way for each person to make judgments about production decisions. For example, line managers can look at order data and delivery dates, and they can see at the same time whether the order will amalgamate with other orders, and whether or not the raw materials are available in stock to cut that order. Relating each order line to costing/specification and fabric stock files gives much more meaningful data for managers to act upon.

"Using Data Access's software products has enabled us to drive the business forward, has reduced cloth wastage, has reduced stocks and has reduced office administration by 2 people," he says. "Also, knowing individual operator performances is incredibly useful."

When asked what Visual DataFlex feature Mr. Haythornthwaite has found to be the most helpful, he replied, "The combination of high level database tools coupled with the low level VDF language, when needed."

But his praise doesn't stop there. "The support on the VDF forums is fantastic and is completely free. Plus, regular updates of VDF mean that the product is improving all the time."

Contact Traditional Weatherwear at +44 1282 696999 , or David Haythornthwaite by e-mail .

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