Semicoa is a world-class manufacturer of small signal, small signal RF, power transistors, and photodiodes for the hi-reliability military and space markets.  Semicoa's mission is to supply quality solid-state solutions to customers worldwide, thereby providing them a business edge in technology, reliability, and performance.

Using Visual ^e, Semicoa’s CIS department has been able to develop applications in our UniVerse database that we never could have dreamed of before.  When we needed to build a very specialized Bill Of Operations (BOO) application on top of our legacy ERP system, I knew we could never meet the specs in green screen.  I looked at legacy extension tools like wIntegrate, but the functionality we needed wasn’t there.  I looked at ODBC with Visual Basic, but the performance was very poor and the learning curve for my staff was too long.  Finally I learned about Visual e from ScanNet Systems.  Visual ^e allowed us to create most of the project without programming, and then to leverage the multi-value programming skills we already had for the really tricky parts.  We were even able to call our already-existing subroutines from Visual ^e, so much of the logic was already done.  And all the Windows functionality we needed was there – scrolling grids, radio buttons, check boxes, push buttons, pop-ups, drop-downs, local printing, faxing, scanning, you name it – native to Visual e with no programming.  The BOO application is a tremendous success.  Whereas, before Visual e, it took the operator as long as 3 hours to create a BOO, now she can do it in less than 10 minutes, and with far greater accuracy.

We have since used Visual ^e to create a Customer Service System that allows our CSR’s to pull up customer account history in compact graphical form or detailed tables just by clicking a few on-screen buttons, rather than navigating from screen to screen to screen in our legacy application.  This allows a CSR to answer customer questions on the phone in just a few seconds with just a few mouse clicks.  Our customers get the feeling that we really know their accounts inside-out.

Visual ^e has made all the difference, allowing us to leverage the value of our multi-value legacy system and bring Semicoa fully into the graphical Windows world.

Paul Dupre

Director – CIS

Semicoa