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The Progress Solution

What’s happening at All Around Sports is the kind of classic business problem that motivates an enterprise to computerize its business systems. When the computer professionals come to All Around Sports, they give the management team one strong recommendation: use Progress. As the computer professionals explain, successfully making the transition from paper systems to computer systems takes two steps.

  1. Move the business information from paper to an electronic form that can be stored in a computer. This step involves:
    1. Gathering together the relevant business information, called data, and analyzing the relationships among the data. At All Around Sports, the relevant data is in the customer, order, and inventory filing cabinets.
    2. Designing and creating an electronic storage structure for the data. The electronic storage structure is called a database. A database that allows users to organize data so that it’s easy to define relationships is called a relational database.
    3. Progress provides the tools that let you easily design, create, and maintain relational databases.

  2. Program the computer to handle business tasks. This step involves:
    1. Breaking each business task into Progress programming language statements.
    2. Storing related statements in procedures. A procedure is a collection of Progress language statements that execute a specific task. The procedures that you create can work together to provide your end users with one tool to do many related tasks.
    3. Creating computer programs that run with an overall look and feel and are easy to learn and use.
    4. Progress provides the tools that let you create and maintain procedures quickly. When you use Progress, you don’t have to program the low-level data-access routines that move data around and take care of the database. This functionality is present and ready for you to tap into from the very first Progress 4GL statement that you write.Your computer instructions—also called code—can concentrate on displaying and manipulating the data in the database.

The database and procedures that you create with Progress form an application—a complete solution to a business problem. The first business problem that All Around Sports wants to tackle is speeding up the sales and inventory process. To do this, it needs a sales and inventory application. In other words, it needs a database for the sales and inventory data and procedures to perform the business tasks associated with the sales and inventory process.

The bottom line is that Progress allows you to create complete solutions to business problems quickly and easily. All Around Sports agrees and joins the fast growing list of Progress application developers.


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