Moving with the times

14 January 2010

Using tools from Alchemy Solutions, Day-Timer has successfully migrated its ERP software to Windows Server and .NET Framework.

Founded more than 60 years ago, Day-Timer prides itself on being a pioneer in the field of time management tools. Now a subsidiary of ACCO Brands, the company recently embarked on an enterprise-wide cost-saving effort. Among the targets of that campaign was the company’s mainframe.

With running costs of US$725,000 per year, the company’s legacy system was an easy target for cost cutting. And while the system had been state-of-the-art when it was purchased 15 years ago, 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, Day-Timer’s system manager. 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 US$22,000 in paper.

Dorney and his colleagues considered their options. They wanted to migrate to a more cost-effective platform, such as the Microsoft Windows Server operating system and .NET Framework, but the question was how to do that without incurring costs high enough to wipe out the benefits. Rewriting the company’s extensive suite of enterprise resource planning applications would have been prohibitively expensive, and commercial applications wouldn’t meet the company’s specialised needs. Some tools existed for migrating CICS/COBOL code, but would require continuing licensing payments.

Then they found Fujitsu NetCOBOL, 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.

The Alchemy NeoKicks tool processed the 3,270 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 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 six developers. Now, instead of US$725,000 per year, the Windows Server deployment costs Day-Timer just US$48,000 per year, a reduction of 93 per cent. In addition, Day-Timer has eliminated the US$22,000 cost of printing reports, as employees now use reports online.

The move to Windows Server has also 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 per cent faster than before.

Although Day-Timer didn’t migrate to increase performance, it gained that benefit as well. Batch processes run 10 to 15 per cent faster. The system also now integrates more easily with third party systems and data, such as the company’s electronic data interchange system, and Day-Timer is easily integrating the Internet into its applications, such as a FedEx Web service for calculating shipping rates.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of Prime magazine.