ElectroNeek

Use case · Systems without an API

AS/400 green-screen inquiries answered in Teams or Slack

Someone types "stock for part 48-2210 in DC2" in a Teams channel. An agent turns the question into inquiry parameters, calls a Studio bot that drives the 5250 session — sign-on, menu, screen, fields — reads the result from the screen, and the agent replies in Teams with the figures, the screen date and a link to the run. Nightly, the same bot can pull lists for Excel. It is the AS/400 integration without touching the AS/400.

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Who it is for
Distributors, manufacturers and logistics companies running ERP on IBM i (AS/400) — JD Edwards World, BPCS, Infor XA, custom RPG — where a few people hold the 5250 access everyone else keeps asking.
Systems involved
IBM i 5250 terminal (Studio Terminals)Teams / Slack / AW chatAI Workflows agentExcel 365

How the run goes

5 steps · logged per run

  1. Trigger01

    Question in Teams / Slack

    Or a schedule for lists

  2. Agent02

    Parse the request

    Part, warehouse, order number

  3. Bot03

    Run the 5250 inquiry

    Terminal activities on a Bot Runner

  4. Agent04

    Format the answer

    Figures, screen timestamp, caveats

  5. System05

    Reply in channel

    With run link and screenshot

Agent decidesDocument becomes fieldsBot does the clicksPerson approves

How it runs, step by step

  1. 1

    A Teams or Slack message in the channel (or a form) starts a run. An agent step extracts the intent and parameters — item number, warehouse, order — and asks a clarifying question if something is missing.

  2. 2

    The workflow calls a Studio bot that runs on a Windows Bot Runner with a terminal emulator session to the IBM i. Studio's terminal activities sign on, navigate menus by option number, fill the inquiry fields, and read the screen regions by row and column — the stable way to automate 5250.

  3. 3

    The screen values are returned as structured data. The agent writes the reply: figures, the on-screen timestamp, and a caveat if the screen showed a warning. The run keeps the screenshot.

  4. 4

    For scheduled lists (open orders, backorders), the bot pages through the result screens into a table that the workflow writes to Excel 365 or a database.

  5. 5

    Access stays controlled: the bot has one IBM i user with read-only authority; who asked what is in the run log.

Limits — what this does not do

  • Read-only by design in the first phase; write transactions on the IBM i are built and reviewed separately.
  • The emulator session lives on a Windows runner; concurrency is one inquiry per session, so busy teams run two or three sessions.
  • An agent formats answers; it never decides what the screen says — the values come from fixed screen positions.

Questions about this process

  • If you have an ODBC path and someone who knows the files, use it — we support database steps too. Most AS/400 shops we meet have neither, and the inquiry screens encode business logic that the tables don't.

  • More than GUI automation: 5250 screens are fixed-position text, so the bot reads rows and columns rather than guessing at elements.

  • Not in this use case. Write-backs are deterministic bot steps with an approval in front, built after the read-only phase proves out.

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