Bluebee Continues to Evolve and Modernize Its ERP Solution with OpenEdge and Kendo UI
Industries:
Technology & SoftwareChallenge
Bluebee recognized the importance of evolving its application to support ever-changing customer requirements.
Solution
Continuously modernize its Progress® OpenEdge® ERP solution over the span of two decades and deploy Progress® Kendo UI® components to provide a modern and intuitive digital experience for its users.
Result
Satisfy the needs of customers through the existing application without sacrificing underlying architecture.
Full Story
Challenge
For more than two decades, Montreal, Quebec-based Bluebee Software has been providing ERP solutions and consulting services to midsize distribution and manufacturing companies. Over that time the world of mission-critical business computing has undergone a number of transformations from the backend to the frontend.
Embracing change is fundamental to survive and thrive in the technology industry. Bluebee realized early on that change equals opportunity. When Bluebee first engaged Progress as a partner, the company was newly established. Since then, Bluebee has grown into a leading software and service provider to the distribution and manufacturing sectors, continuously evolving its Progress OpenEdge-based ERP application to meet everchanging customer demand.
In recent years, brothers Julien Laporte, President, and Simon Laporte, Vice President,
have taken the helm of the company from its founder, their father Sylvain Laporte.
Together, this next generation is taking Bluebee to new heights with an application with
broad market appeal, investing heavily into a new frontend UI with functionality that
resonates with industries like food manufacturing and distribution.
With Progress we’ve been able to successfully evolve the application over the years.
Julien Laporte
President, Bluebee Software
Solution
Continuing to build on the OpenEdge platform requires training new developers in the OpenEdge ABL (Advanced Business Language), a process that has gone smoothly.
“It doesn’t take long to get somebody up and running at the basic level, to be able to jump in and help on debugging some applications or doing some basic queries,” said Simon Laporte. Regarding advanced architecture, he makes sure junior team members are mentored by senior staff. He added, “It never really is a showstopper for us when we’re hiring because we know that we’ve got the training and mentoring program to get people up to speed quickly.”
The Bluebee team realizes that its success hinges on the ability to stay a step ahead of its customers and help ensure their ongoing success. That means they need to architect their solution to easily facilitate integration and support change so they can be responsive to evolving business requirements and keep pace with what the market not only needs today, but what it demands tomorrow.
The answer continues to be in the OpenEdge application
development platform and the Progress® Kendo UI® component
library to help deliver modern, intuitive UI to its users.
Result
Today, thousands of users rely on Bluebee to support their business processes. Bluebee’s ERP application has undergone tremendous change over the years to remain modern. It is offered in both a cloud and on-premises version, and the frontend has been enhanced with the deployment of Kendo UI components to deliver a superior, intuitive end user experience.
“With Kendo UI we can easily build things like charts, schedulers and calendars with just a few lines of code,” said Julien Laporte. “It gives us the ability to quickly satisfy the needs of our customers to deliver a consistent, easy to use, intuitive digital user experience.”
Additionally, Bluebee has also integrated a number of new features into their solution, including business intelligence. Although Bluebee’s ERP has undergone changes through the years to meet the ever-changing requirements of its customers, one thing that has not changed is the underlying technology.
“Despite all of the advancements we have made to modernize our system, we haven’t had to make any significant changes to the code or business logic,” said Simon Laporte. “Meeting the unique needs of our customers requires that we only make simple changes to the surface of our solution, like the UI, not to the underlying architecture. And because our architecture is so open and flexible, we can easily integrate with existing systems and new technologies. This is the reason we can continuously offer so many new features and possibilities to our customers.”
Simon concluded that the long-term partnership with Progress has been vital to its success.
“We’ve been long-time Progress developers because the
product is so solid. But we also respect that Progress
has excellent expertise. They really took the time to
understand what we do—who our market is and what
customers are looking for from our solutions—it all adds
up to a real sense of partnership,” he said.