LifeWay Christian Resources is a religious nonprofit organization and is an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention. LifeWay produces Bibles, church literature, books, music, audio and video recordings, church supplies, and Internet services. The ministry operates 154 LifeWay Christian Stores across the country. LifeWay’s home office is in Nashville, Tennessee, where about 1250 employees work.

LifeWay has successfully implemented Oracle EBS Financials, Projects, APC, Inventory, Purchasing, Order Management and Advanced Pricing modules for its global operations. LifeWay is on version 11.5.10.2 and their production database size is 1200 GB.

Data loading activities performed by LifeWay:

• Item creation and update.
• Item categories, item catalogs and item cross
reference creation and update.
• PLM: Advanced Products Catalog creation.
• Bills of material Creation and Update.
• New Customer Creation and Update.
• AR Invoice, Credit Memos and Debit memo creation.
• AR Cash Receipt application with or without the invoice numbers.
• Project Budget Creation.
• Projects with tasks and key member creation and update.
• Price List creation and update.
• Sales order processing.

LifeWay chooses appLOAD™
LifeWay evaluated and selected appLOAD™ productivity tool from Chain-Sys Corporation for its Data
Loading activities in Oracle E-Business Suite. appLOAD™ is a new generation data conversion tool for
Oracle E-Business Suite R12/11i. appLOAD™ is a reliable and scalable back end web based application which is not front end driven and not EXCEL macros driven. This tool aims to reduce the cost and time of Oracle EBS data conversion activities. Any Business User can confidently use this tool and convert the data without any technical assistance. With appLOAD™, there is no programming required for any of your data conversion needs. appLOAD supports all the open interfaces and API’s available within Oracle E-Business Suite R12/11i.

The Struggle with DataLoader
Manual mass data loading/maintenance within Oracle E-Business Suite can be tedious and very time
consuming. LifeWay utilized DataLoader for performing data loading as an alternative to manual methods. The DataLoader tool took lot of time and still could not provide a fool-proof and robust solution. Amy Goolsby recalls that for about 1500 items loading it required constant monitoring and took 2 weeks with 8 computers in the conference room. This time does not include the data loader spread sheet preparation time.

appLOAD™ Benefits

• Time and cost savings.
• Highly stable, reliable, and scalable.
• Fast in processing the data loads.
• All processes are executed on the application server as a Java process (thread).
• No need to watch Desktop/Laptop screens. when processing takes place.
• Highly user friendly.

Productivity gains using appLOAD™
Within a week of installing appLOAD, the business users started using the tool very effectively for their data loads. Amy Goolsby remarks, "What I like about appLOAD is how fast it is. appLOAD executes the data loading processes in the background with no baby sitting needed. I can do the same task in 4 hours that used to take two weeks."

David Jamieson of LifeWay says, "The projected return on investment provided through use of the appLOAD application easily justified the cost of the product. We have identified uses that impact all business areas within E-Business Suite. Chain-Sys has been extremely responsive in identifying the most efficient uses of the tools and responding to our questions as we have begun to use the tool."

The Right Tool
The appLOAD™ tools are a right choice for the IT environments of today and the technology changes that are coming up. Rooted in Enterprise Java/J2EE standards, it takes advantage of the enterprise quality scalability and reliability of the platform and is amenable to traditional deployments within the enterprise as well as to the Software as a Service model. appLOAD™ is currently available in Managed SaaS and Subscription SaaS for EBS Data Conversion needs.