Scriptura Customer: Screwfix Direct

How Screwfix Direct Ltd. implemented Scriptura XBOS into their Order Management System

Screwfix Direct Ltd. is the UK's largest direct and online supplier of trade tools and hardware products. The head office, contact centre and distribution centre, is located in Somerset and they operate satellite distribution centres in Stoke-on-Trent and Leicester. With over 30 years of experience in the industry, they ensure next day delivery service UK wide. Screwfix Direct employs over 1500 people and has a revenue of over £ 200,000,000.

Current solution was no longer sufficient

A while ago, Screwfix Direct deployed a major business change programme, implementing a new order management system, called 'Yantra Distributed Order Management'. As part of this programme of business change, Screwfix Direct required a way of printing its invoices and dispatch notes. Although the new order management system fulfilled most requirements, printing of invoices and dispatch notes wasn't possible, so a third party product was the only solution.

First Apache FOP was used to print the invoices, but soon a new solution was necessary, to improve the performance, add bar code functionalities and reduce development time. Screwfix Direct was also very concerned about not having commercial support.

Scriptura XBOS : The solution

To be able to find a product that would meet all these needs, Screwfix Direct searched the Internet, and found Inventive Designers' Scriptura XBOS. They selected Scriptura XBOS as their solution, not only because of faster rendering on complex reports, full XSL-FO and PCL support, built-in bar code support and support for true type fonts, but also because custom development was possible and support is available.

The implementation of Scriptura XBOS

The Order Management System is a product that runs on BEA WebLogic, with an Oracle 9i database, running on Sun Solaris. One of the biggest advantages of Scriptura XBOS was that it is a multi-platform product. It is developed in a Windows environment, but it runs on any kind of Java-supporting Operating System, like Linux, Sun Solaris, iSeries, and so on. Another advantage was that Scriptura XBOS can connect to almost any relational database, via a JDBC driver and so the Oracle database was no problem at all.

The Scriptura XBOS templates were designed and pre-processed into XSLT. At runtime the OMS creates the XML files and transforms the XSLT files to XSL-FO. After that the Scriptura XBOS Server is called via Java calls to render the XSL-FO files to the file system as PDF and PCL files.

"The implementation of Scriptura XBOS was very smooth. The product has been simple to develop with and easy to implement, with impressive results." said Simon Trowbridge, Technical Projects Manager for Screwfix Direct Ltd.

The added value of Scriptura XBOS to the Screwfix Direct environment

Scriptura XBOS has brought Screwfix Direct a considerable added value, not only because they are now able to produce invoices and dispatch notes, but also because of a little cost in development time, Q&A testing time and technical deployment time. Support calls were dealt with quickly and professionally, which resulted in a minimum delay for the project.

Contact information

Simon Trowbridge
Technical Projects Manager
Simon.Trowbridge(at)screwfix(dot)com