Fecher adds browser technology and Modern UI to leading ERP for the box industry

Web-enabling makes Amtech Software's iNEXT ready for the Cloud

Washington, District of (prnob) October 14, 2015 - fecher announces the successful completion of an application modernization project for Amtech Software (www.amtechsoftware.com). The company, based in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, is the leading worldwide provider of software solutions for the corrugated and folding carton manufacturing industries. IMAGINERA ERP consists of more than 110 individual applications. The fecher project, lasting just under one year, began with an automated conversion of these applications from Gupta to .NET. In subsequent project stages, fecher web-enabled and re-designed the user interface. Today, Amtech introduced its clients to the resulting cloud-enabled Modern UI browser software called iNEXT. The roll-out is expected to begin in early 2016.

"From the very beginning, we have set really ambitious goals for the next generation of our market leading IMAGINERA ERP software," explains Mark Handzlik, Amtech Chief Development Officer. "We wanted our users to be able to work with our software anyplace, at any time, on any device. Yet, in so doing, we did not want to lose our enormous investment of hundreds of man-years of development that have gone into this product over the last 15 years." In this combined porting and web-enabling project by fecher, Amtech has found the ideal solution for its software and its clients. Between August 2014 and June 2015, the fecher team transferred more than 2.4 million lines of code, 880 screen forms with 1,250 dialogs and 800 reports to an ASP.NET environment with an HTML5 front end.

The new iNEXT software continues to offer all of the functions of the previous software (Preserved Enrichments), except it is now based on state-of-the-art technology. As a browser solution, the software now also supports mobile workers such as sales reps, designers and drivers. Moreover, a new client portal provides seamless supply chain management, from order to production and delivery.  "This means we have also already created an ideal foundation for future customer self-service apps, letting our users and their customers save even more time and money", Handzlik gladly reports.

Both users and software company benefit

Once they've decided to migrate to iNEXT, the round 50,000 users of 900 installations of IMAGINERA can however continue working without interruption. "When switching to a new generation of software, ensuring one hundred percent continuity is a critical factor in application modernization," explains Günter Hofmann, Managing Director at fecher. "Naturally, this applies to both the users of a business-critical ERP system as well as the Amtech development team that will later maintain and improve the application. This is the most important advantage to using our tool-based approach for application modernization."

"We've outsourced many software projects in the past and have thereby come to know a wide range of service providers," says Handzlik, summarizing his experiences. "fecher has proven itself to be a highly professional partner that has readily taken on all of our special requirements and implemented them to our utmost satisfaction.  Even without a risky redevelopment that would have been many times more expensive, we now have a brand new product that offers everything our current and future clients want."

For questions and further information please contact:

fecher LLC
Eberhard Fecher
1010 Wisconsin Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20007, USA
Phone +1 (202) 629-0294 Ext: 703
Fax +1 (202) 629-0294
Eberhard.Fecher@fecher.net
www.fecher.net

in-house Agentur eK
Michael Ihringer
Kastanienallee 24
64289 Darmstadt, Germany
Phone +49 (6151) 30830-0
Fax +49 (6151) 30830-11
ihringer@in-house.de
www.in-house.de

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