Mainframe-To-Windows Server Move Speeds Agility up to 300 Percent for Global Publisher

Situation

You think your job is tough? Be grateful you’re not Dave Schaeffer.

As Vice President, Distribution and Fulfillment, for publishing giant Simon & Schuster, Schaeffer is responsible for the company’s distribution of 262 million books per year. That means staying on top of 1.9 million orders and 5,000 tractor-trailer truckloads of books—enough trucks, parked end to end, to cover the highway from the company’s suburban Philadelphia distribution center to New York City.

But, to hear Schaeffer tell it, managing the volume of business is the least demanding part of the job. Far more challenging is the increasing pace at which Schaeffer and his colleagues must manage that business.

“This is a demanding, consumer-driven business,” says Schaeffer. “If an author does well on Oprah or 60 Minutes, we get a sudden rush of orders that has to be fulfilled immediately. That’s just a small example of what we call ‘extreme publishing’: reducing the cycle time for every aspect of publishing, from authoring to getting the published book into the customer’s hands. Processes that used to happen once a day now have to happen several times a day. That not only requires doing things faster, it requires doing them differently—such as integrating our order processes with those of our customers on one end, and our distribution processes with those of our distribution partners on the other end.”

But Simon & Schuster’s IT systems weren’t designed for that type of speed, flexibility, or integration. At the core of its order fulfillment process was UOPS: the Universal Order Processing System. UOPS was one of five key Simon & Schuster systems—the others were systems for manufacturing, sales and invoicing, returns, and financials—on an aging, mainframe computer. The applications totaled some five million lines of code, with data stored in DB/2 databases and in virtual storage access method (VSAM) files.

While Simon & Schuster needs to ship orders on an on-demand basis, the mainframe was inflexible. “The mainframe let us ship books at two specific times: early in the morning and at midday,” says Schaeffer. “If books had to go out at another time, it happened as an act of God—the whole IT organization had to figure out how to work around the system.”

That inflexibility was due to the system’s reliance on batch processing. As the business demands on the system grew, so did the length of the batch cycle—to 12 hours or more, often running into the morning, while Schaeffer and 75 other Simon & Schuster employees waited for the batch processes to be completed and for the system to be released for their use. Even during the day, processes could take several minutes to implement, “an eternity” for frustrated users, according to Schaeffer, who were often multitasking and couldn’t wait for the system to catch up to them.

Even getting an order out in the evening was no more than a mixed blessing for the company; the order might get out but, if it was too late in the evening for UOPS, the invoicing wouldn’t happen until the next day. For a business as big as Simon & Schuster’s, the lagging invoicing meant a significant loss in cash flow.

As Simon & Schuster’s mainframe reached the limits of both its capacity and its useful life, the company faced the question of how it could better meet the business needs of “extreme publishing.”

Solution

Replacing the existing mainframe with a more powerful version—the company estimated it would need three times the capacity on another mainframe—was cost-prohibitive.

Going to a UNIX-based solution “would have required a huge amount of reengineering of our code and it would have cost a lot of money,” says Anne Lloyd Davies, Chief Information Officer, Simon & Schuster. She says the company also considered a commercial ERP solution, but that route too “was going to cost us a fortune, and we couldn’t really see a lot of benefit from it.”

Choosing .NET and Windows

The Windows Server® environment offered the most cost-effective platform but, even there, the cost of rewriting five million lines of code would have taken longer, and cost more, than the company wanted—if it even could have been done. “A lot of our business logic was buried in COBOL code and wasn’t well documented,” says Michael J. Grant, Vice President, Applications Development, Simon & Schuster. “Rewriting this code wasn’t a great option.”

Instead, Davies, Grant, and their colleagues found their “great option” in NetCOBOL and NeoKicks technologies from Fujitsu, which would enable them to port their existing applications to native Microsoft® .NET code. As a result, they would be able to preserve their original business logic, written in Customer Information Control System (CICS)/COBOL programs—and, thus, also to preserve their investment in that business logic and in the IT professionals who were familiar with it. The process also promised to be faster and less expensive than rewriting the applications for .NET. The company also chose to migrate the DB/2 database and VSAM files to Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database software.

To run these ported solutions, Simon & Schuster chose a 32-bit, eight-processor Unisys ES7000 running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The solution is managed with Microsoft manageability technologies such as System Center Operations Manager 2007 and its add-ins for SQL Server and Internet Information Services (in the Windows Server operating system).

“We had a choice: to scale up—with the ES7000—or to scale out with a Windows Server farm,” says Grant. “We chose to scale up because we would be using our existing staff to maintain the solution and they didn’t have a lot of experience with server farms. This was the closest to what they were familiar with from the mainframe.”

Consistent with the goal of implementing the new solution quickly and cost effectively, Simon & Schuster also set a goal to minimize the need to retrain its business users on the new solution. Accordingly, it chose to keep the majority of its existing presentation screens, modifying only those screens where the anticipated productivity gain would outweigh the investment in retraining.

Moving forward, the .NET environment gives the company the ability to develop new functionality and new presentation screens in a highly graphical format, and to add these features and screens to the existing mix, allowing Simon & Schuster to evolve its solution at a pace of its own choosing. The .NET solution also makes it easier for the company to use Web services and other integration technologies to facilitate closer communications and transactions with customers and business partners.

Implementing the Solution

To implement the porting of the business logic, Simon & Schuster turned to Microsoft Gold Certified Solution Provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

TCS used tools including the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system and the Fujitsu NeoKicks migration toolkit. Figure 1 shows the migration process:

The 3270 screen layouts are processed by a map processor, where they are converted to XML-formatted description files. The XML files are converted to Microsoft ASP.NET Web pages using the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool as the code-behind language.

COBOL source code is processed by the NeoKicks preprocessor to route all CICS calls to the NeoKicks Services class library.

Configuration information, such as transaction codes and program mappings, are transferred to the web.config file in ASP.NET with the help of a NeoKicks wizard.

Benefits

By moving from the mainframe to Windows Server and .NET, Simon & Schuster got both the increased business agility and reduced costs that it sought.

Business Agility up as Much as 300 Percent

By porting its UOPS and related systems to Windows Server from the mainframe, Simon & Schuster has increased business agility by up to 300 percent. For example, advance shipping notices to large retail customers, such as Barnes & Noble, used to go out once daily; now customers receive these reports on impending deliveries three times per day, giving them more timely and accurate information on which they can base their own business activities.

The shipping backlog has been cut by 33 percent, from three days to two days. The quarter-end financial close has been cut in half, from 3 days to 1.5, eliminating the need to shut down the warehouse during financial processing. And the nightly batch window has been cut in half, exceeding the company’s projections and helping to ensure system availability when business users come to work in the morning.

“We’re not only faster in all of our regular processes; it’s also easier for us to handle anything unusual,” says Schaeffer. “If a customer places a last-minute order that has to go out, it goes out. The technology no longer delays us until the next day, or requires us to do it manually, or at extra expense. We can react throughout the day and run orders into our warehouse as we need to.”

Davies agrees—and sees a major strategic edge for the company. “Moving to the Microsoft environment has given Simon & Schuster a big advantage over our competitors,” she says. “The huge benefit of moving to Microsoft is that now all of our applications are on the same platform, a platform that’s very flexible and that makes it easy to respond to business change. It makes us much more agile in the marketplace.”

IT Budget Reduced by 11 Percent

Reducing the cost of its systems was a key interest at Simon & Schuster, and the port to Windows Server and the Microsoft .NET Framework have helped to reduce costs. Grant estimates the company saved as much as 80 percent over the cost of expanding the mainframe environment or rewriting the solutions for UNIX.

Moreover, the company has seen support costs drop because the new environment is easier to manage. As a result, IT now saves about 11 percent of its operating budget—“which is significant,” says Davies.

Trouble Tickets Cut 75 Percent

In researching their proposed solution, Davies and her colleagues were convinced that they could get at least as much reliability and performance out of the Windows Server environment as they saw from their mainframe. Experience with the new solution bears that out.

Processes that formerly took several minutes are now completed in seconds, according to Schaeffer, which boosts the productivity of order fulfillment personnel because the system now works as quickly as they do. Reliability is up too, according to Grant. In the mainframe environment, the IT department generally had between 80 and 90 trouble tickets open at any one time.

With the Windows Server-based solution, that number is almost always below 20, a decrease of at least 75 percent. And compliance with service-level agreements—to the business units and to outside publishers to which the company contracts its services—has also risen since the move to Windows Server.

“With Windows Server and .NET, our system is more reliable because it’s less expensive and time consuming to maintain, so we’re able to do a better job of maintenance, which heads off problems before they occur,” says Grant. “In the mainframe environment, the cost of finding and resolving the root causes of problems was high so, often, we’d patch the problem rather than really solving it. Now, we can afford not only to solve problems, but to prevent them.”

Recruitment, Morale Enhanced

Despite all the hard, quantifiable benefits of the move to Windows Server and .NET, some of the most important benefits to Simon & Schuster are the ones it can’t measure.

“By porting our existing code to .NET, we were able to retain the people who know that code,” says Grant. “And more than just retain them, we can give them new tools—Microsoft tools—with which to grow both our solutions and their skills. That really helps boost morale.”

“Before, it was very hard to attract new people, because no one wanted to work in the old environment,” agrees Davies. “Now, with Windows Server and .NET, we have an exciting environment for people to come into.”

“The whole mainframe environment’s coming down just like the Berlin Wall came down,” says Schaeffer. “The freedom that has come is phenomenal.”

Microsoft .NET

Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.

.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.

For more information about Microsoft .NETand Web services, please visit these Web sites:

msdn.microsoft.com/webservices