METRO Group

Trade – that is the world of METRO Group, one of the worldwide largest trading groups. It was created in 1996 in a merger of several important retail companies. Based on its successful performance in the domestic market the group soon expanded into foreign markets as well. Today, METRO AG is at the head of a capital marketorientated, highly-competitive retail group with an international profile. At more than 2,300 locations in 28 countries the Metro company proves this competence – with concepts that meet the highest quality demands.

Business Units and Sales Divisions of the Group

METRO Group has a definite structured portfolio of group companies that operate in the market place according to distinct and specific distribution concepts. These so-called sales divisions operate in the four business units Cash & Carry, Food Retailing, Nonfood Specialty Stores and Department Stores. Their customers are both businesses and consumers. The six sales divisions of the METRO Group stand for names that have become for many people a part of everyday life:

Metro Cash & Carry International GmbH
Real SB-Warenhaus GmbH
Extra Verbrauchermärkte GmbH
Media-Saturn-Holding GmbH
Praktiker-Bau- und Heimwerkermärkte AG
Kaufhof Warenhaus AG

MIAG C.V. , Diemen NL, Branch Baar

Our Company belongs to the METRO AG and assume the centralized payment and its guarantee, as well as some international co-ordination for our European affiliated companies and their suppliers. In this connection we develope solutions for our customers, the suppliers of the Metro Group, to deliver the payment advice as a PDF. Also we provide the PDF on our Internet Portal www.miag.com for download. The monthly output is about 150'000 pages. A part of these we produce with txt2pdf.

Application

We receive the data from our Japanese business partner in a different codepage “shif-jis”, and we will import these in our database. Within the payment process we export the data from our Oracle 9i database, with an SQL procedure. A Cobol program provides a Ascii-file in the correct format. This Ascii-File will be converted with txt2pdf from Sanface. Normally, in use with western codepages, there are no problems. We use the utilities from txt2pdf (configured) for other projects, also with Czech and Slovakian characters. At the conversation from data with japanese and western characters, it was not possible to get a correct result with txt2pdf version 7.3. The problem was, to use „fixed width“ fonts. Since the characters are deposited still with a layout, the individual indications must always be positioned exactly. Unfortunately at the start of the project we can’t use txt2pdf within this project. With the assistance and support from Sanface, we fount a work around to create an account form, with “shift-jis” data from the data base, as well with both, japanese and western indications in the same print file.

Here you can find the original PDF file description of this project.