(Source: Business Wire)
Alchemy Solutions, Inc., provider of legacy modernization solutions,
today announced that Day-Timer, Inc. has turned to Alchemy (www.AlchemySolutions.com)
to drive down mainframe costs and make its business more productive.
Using Alchemy's legacy migration and modernization tools, Day-Timer (www.DayTimer.com),
the leader in personal productivity improvement, has migrated its ERP
software to Windows Server and the Microsoft .NET Framework, saving
$725,000 in the process.
In addition to dramatic mainframe savings, Day-Timer has improved its
own business productivity, and reports that batch processing is 10
percent faster and developers 25 percent more responsive to business
needs. Besides minimizing mainframe MIPS, eliminating the printing of
mainframe green-screen reports saved the company an additional $22,000
in paper costs alone.
As the world-renowned maker of personal productivity tools, Day-Timer
anticipated the economic slowdown that began in 2008, and embarked on an
enterprise-wide cost-saving effort. With annual costs running $725,000,
the mainframe system was an obvious target. Day-Timer was running its
applications on an IBM 2086-130 with CICS and batch COBOL applications,
and VSAM data.
The mainframe was once 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. While the system had been state of the art 15 years
before, when it had been commissioned, Day-Timer now wanted to modernize
its system by taking 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," said Dennis Dorney,
System Manager, Day-Timer.
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 Microsoft .NET Framework, without incurring costs
that might be high enough to wipe out the benefit. Rewriting 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 NeoKicks, NeoBatch and Fujitsu NetCOBOL, all distributed
by Alchemy Solutions.
