Case Study:

Migration in practice: Eurocopter

1 December 2006

In 1997, Eurocopter, the world's largest helicopter manufacturer, used only self-developed mainframe applications for its commercial systems at its Donauw?rth and Ottobrunn locations in Germany. Eurocopter had produced numerous applications based on PL1, VSAM, CICS and Cobol, which depicted all of the company's business processes including management, purchasing, production planning and control. In fact, everything that could be considered ERP was written internally. However, the IT environment changed fundamentally with the merger of the IT systems at Eurocopter's two locations.

In 1997, Eurocopter began a move to SAP and used only SAP modules since 2000. There were several factors for the change to standard software; the existing applications no longer met the users' needs and the company did not want to put more effort into making the old applications Y2K compliant.

There were also operating costs associated with the outsourcing of the computer centre in 1995. Eurocopter wanted to keep benefits of outsourcing, such as the detailed invoice of services, while keeping the overall operating costs in line. "This enabled us to control the computer centre pricing in a targeted manner," explains Bernhard Gebhart, applications manager for Eurocopter in Donauw?rth.

With the decision to integrate the systems into SAP R3, the outsourcing decision was reversed. Although not at a mainframe level, separate servers were again set up in Donauw?rth for the SAP applications. "We brought the complete IT competence back in-house again ? hardware, application, system and network," explains Gebhart. "Since that time, only functions such as user service, user helpdesk and PC installation remain outsourced."

By 2001, the Zina time management system was the last remaining legacy/Cobol application at Eurocopter. Zina is a very complex and heavily customised application. After in-depth studies, the department could see that its requirements would not be met by the relevant R3 modules. To customise again would take a further year.

Mainframe operations had to be maintained and computer centre capacity rented solely for Zina, even after the other mainframe applications had been switched off. The costs were disproportionately high, especially because the company required licenses for CICS, databases, the mainframe operating system and support. "We had to pay for the complete computer centre infrastructure even though this environment no longer matched our strategy," explains Gebhart.

After unsuccessful attempts to move the time management application from the mainframe to a client/server architecture, the only solution that remained was to run the application unchanged on a PC system that emulates a mainframe.

"At the start we did not believe that depicting a mainframe on another platform would actually work in live operation," reported Gebhart. "But when the application provider, Unilog, managed to migrate one of our host programs onto a laptop in a single afternoon, we decided to try it out."

Eurocopter moved Zina to a standard Windows server with support from Unilog and Micro Focus. The most significant aspect of the migration is its operational efficiency. The investment for licenses, the new Windows server, consulting and application conversion total less than ?50,000 and ongoing maintenance costs are under ?9,000 annually.

"The project paid for itself in considerably less than a year," says Gebhart. "The solution has been live for over two years now and we are very satisfied with it. The project involved so few problems it was almost a shame we didn't have other programs to migrate."