When Fair-Rite Products Corporation, a global supplier of ferrite parts for the electronics industry, decided to upgrade their existing website and product catalog, they began looking for a practical solution to efficiently improve their e-biz and e-commerce abilities with the IBM i (AS/400, iSeries) platform.

Previously, Fair-Rite allowed their customers to download the product catalog as a PDF directly from their website, but there were difficulties. The file was so large that customers complained about the inability to easily search the information and the amount of time it took to download the catalog from the site. On top of that, Fair-Rite was also unable to readily update information or add new parts to the catalog.

To combat these issues, Fair-Rite began expending precious time and money on solutions to render the PDF's information into a web-based digital catalog. Once these attempts proved unsuccessful, the electronics supplier came across another tool, called RPGsp, which offered a better solution for the company’s current situation. The new tool provided Fair-Rite with a rapid Web development environment that allowed them to successfully create an online version of their product catalog.