Microsoft Mainframe Migration
Customer Solution Case Study
Productivity Tools Maker Cuts Costs 94%
with Move from Mainframe to Windows
Server
Customer: Day-Timer
Web Site: www.daytimer.com
Customer Size: 400 employees
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing
Partner: Alchemy Solutions
Partner Web Site:
www.alchemysolutions.com
Customer Profile
Day-Timer, based in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, is a pioneer in the field
of time management and provides the
tools for people in all walks of life to
increase their personal productivity.
Software and Services
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft SQL Server 2008
− Windows Server 2003
 Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
 Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
 Third-party software
− Alchemy NeoBatch
− Alchemy NeoKicks
−
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“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Benefits
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.
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.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published July 2009
The move to Windows Server has
reduced maintenance requirements,
enabling Day-Timer to redeploy the
resources formerly devoted to a 12person operations staff. Software
development is easier too, enabling the
company to redeploy the resources
formerly devoted to three programmers.