DirectGroup Bertelsmann

For Círculo de Leitores (CLP), the leading book club in Portugal owned by DirectGroup Bertelsmann, smartShift has replaced the mainframe infrastructure of a fulfilment system step-by-step with a multilayered Windows based architecture to enable cost savings of 90 percent in hardware and licenses. The new development environment offers more flexibility and allows CLP to adapt to business requirements faster.

The Mission

The Fulfillment System of Círculo de Leitores has to be modernized. Short term CPU-upgrades were necessary and other hardware components were not further supported from the suppliers. In addition, the costs for software-licenses are increasing by 32%. Furthermore half of the employees are about to retire in the next 5 years taking with them the know-how of the system. The business processes are highly adapted and strategic to CLP. Therefore a replacement by standard software as an alternative was not an option. Furthermore, the customizations of a standard product would have resulted in enormous internal efforts (changes in business processes, education, new application). A redevelopment of the application could not be considered because of cost and time factors. A feasibility study had been conducted to justify the modernization of the application.

The Legacy System

The fulfillment system was operated on a mainframe Multiprise 3000 H30 with VM/VSE as the operating system and CICS as Transaction Processing Monitor. Three different databases (DL/I, VSAM and DB/2) with 400 GB of data have been used. The application consisted of 1,5 million lines of code (Cobol, Assembler and Visual Age) as well as 1300 screens (3270 Terminal) for 250 users and 55000 transactions per day have been executed (maximum of 30 transactions per second).

The Solution

The solution is comprised of an evolutionary implementation of the Mainframe-Environment trough a multilayered architecture. To gain immediate cost savings the application on the mainframe has been migrated in Phase 1 to a Windows platform using a development environment from MicroFocus on Windows Server 2003). Therefore the programming languages Assembler and Visual Age Generator have been transformed to Cobol and were consolidated in to one Cobol system. Micro Focus delivered the integrated development environment. The JCL was automatically converted to Object Rexx. Solutions for scheduler, printing and version controls were replaced by standard Windows products. In Phase 2 a data base consolidation will be implemented. The databases VSAM and DL/I will be transferred to a relational data base management system (DB2). In addition the application is divided into components that allow through Using MicroFocus NetExpress / EnterpriseServer the architectures delivers the basis for a service oriented architecture allowing CLP to introduce web services. With this flexible architecture the application can now be gradually further developed by using Java, XML and .NET.

The Benefits

The running costs for hardware, tools and licenses had been reduced by approx. 90% after 6 months! For this reason the costs of the project amortized already after 1.5 years. Furthermore, the changes of technology were synchronized with the retirement plans to ensure a smooth transition within the development team and to avoid potential reconstruction costs. The resulting architecture is now open and flexible; proprietary programming languages and data bases could be eliminated.