Customer Solution Case Study
/ Productivity Tools Maker Cuts Costs 94% with Move from Mainframe to Windows Server
“On a straight apples-to-apples comparison, Windows Server is just easier to maintain than the mainframe.”
Dennis Dorney, System Manager, Day-Timer
Day-Timer, the world-renowned maker of personal productivity tools, wanted to increase its own productivity by reducing costs—including the U.S.$725,000 annual cost of the mainframe on which it ran its business. The company migrated its ERP software to Windows Server® and the Microsoft® .NET Framework, using tools from Alchemy Solutions. The result cut costs by 94 percent. As a bonus, batch processing is 10 percent faster and developers are 25 percent more responsive to business needs.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published July 2009
Business Needs
Since its founding more than 60 years ago, Day-Timer has prided itself on being a pioneer in the field of time management tools, and in helping people to gain the skills to manage time and cope with information and change. That made it all the more important that the company, now a subsidiary of ACCO Brands, continue to cope with the changes it found in its own environment. For example, anticipating the economic slowdown that began in 2008, the company embarked on an enterprisewide cost-saving effort. Among the targets of that campaign: The company’s mainframe.
The mainframe was an IBM 2086-130 running CICS and batch COBOL applications with VSAM data. It was essential to the company, operating a highly customized enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that covered everything from order entry and shipping to inventory management and accounts receivable.
With costs running U.S.$725,000 per year, the system was an easy target for cost-cutting. Moreover, while the system had been state of the art 15 years before, when it had been commissioned, Day-Timer now wanted to take advantage of capabilities that hadn’t been considered, let alone implemented, in the early 1990s, such as integration with third-party systems and connection to the Internet.
“There were some workarounds for communicating with other systems, such as dropping FTP files somewhere and hoping they worked, but it was manual, very awkward, and not very effective,” says Dennis Dorney, System Manager, Day-Timer.
Another target for Dorney and his colleagues were the reports that the company used based on the mainframe system. There were hundreds of them, and employees in the mainframe operations group printed those reports whenever they were needed—costing another $22,000 in paper. But with their 3270 green screens limited to 20 rows of 80 characters each, they had little choice.
Solution
Dorney and his colleagues considered their options. They wanted to migrate to a more cost-effective platform, such as the Windows Server® operating system and the Microsoft® .NET Framework, but the question was how to do that without incurring costs high enough to wipe out the benefit. Rewriting the company’s extensive suite of ERP applications would have been prohibitively expensive, and commercial applications wouldn’t meet the company’s specialized needs. Some tools existed for migrating CICS/COBOL code, but would require continuing licensing payments.
Then they found Fujitsu NetCOBOL, and NeoKicks and NeoBatch, all tools distributed by Alchemy Solutions. They would enable Day-Timer to migrate its applications to native Microsoft ASP.NET code to run as Web applications over the company’s intranet. Day-Timer would preserve its original business logic and its investment in that logic.
The Alchemy NeoKicks tool processed the 3270 screen layouts, which were converted to ASP.NET Web pages. The CICS/COBOL source code was processed by NeoKicks to route all CICS calls to the NeoKicks Services class library. Configuration information, such as transaction codes and program mappings, were transferred to the web.config file in ASP.NET. The Alchemy NeoBatch tool supported the batch jobs. The VSAM data was originally migrated to Btrieve and now is being migrated to Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 data management software using NeoData, another Alchemy Solutions tool.
The migration included 1,600 applications and 1,300 batch jobs, and was completed over 15 months by a team of 6 developers. Instead of the IBM 2086-130, the Day-Timer ERP suite now runs on IBM X3755 dual-processor server hardware, an IBM DS4700 SAN, and Windows Server 2003.
Benefits
Day-Timer moved from the IBM mainframe to Windows Server primarily to reduce cost. It has done a remarkable job at that, virtually eliminating the amount previously spent on the mainframe. Instead of $725,000 per year, the Windows Server deployment costs Day-Timer just $48,000 per year, a reduction of 93 percent. In addition, Day-Timer has eliminated the $22,000 cost of printing reports as employees now use reports online.
The move to Windows Server has reduced maintenance requirements, enabling Day-Timer to redeploy the resources formerly devoted to a 12-person operations staff. Software development is easier too, enabling the company to redeploy the resources formerly devoted to three programmers.
Dorney notes that debugging software using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 development system is faster and more efficient than using what he calls “the limited tools” available for the mainframe. Developers can work more effectively, copying files to their desktop quickly to work on their local machines. As a result, he estimates his developers respond to updates requested by the business at least 20 to 25 percent faster than before.
Day-Timer kept the original look and feel of its user interface screens—although those screens are now accessed through a Windows® Internet Explorer® Web browser—to avoid having to retrain workers. “90 percent didn’t even notice the difference,” says Dorney.
Although Day-Timer didn’t migrate to increase performance, it gained that benefit as well. Batch processes run 10 to 15 percent faster. The system now integrates more easily with third-party systems and data, such as the company’s electronic data interchange system, which “wasn’t possible in the mainframe world,” says Dorney. And Day-Timer is easily integrating the Internet into its applications, such as a FedEx Web service for calculating shipping rates that is integrated into the Day-Timer shipping application.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published July 2009