OpenText™ Micro Focus™ Enterprise Server gives European fashion giant drastically improved performance, cost savings, and flexibility to meet new business requirements

About E.Miroglio

E.Miroglio is a rapidly expanding leader in the textile world. Today the company operates seven manufacturing and office sites located in Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, France, and China.

Countries:

22
Consumer customers:

5 million
Single brand stores:

1,100
Staff:

2,200

Summary

Challenges

Migrate from AIX to x86 Linux in a 24/7 business.
Respond faster to changing business requirements.
Create a more cost-effective platform with easier to source skills.

Solution

Micro Focus Enterprise Server supports standardized and simplified platform migration.
Business-critical components in 12,000 COBOL programs are reused.
OpenText™ LoadRunner™ deployed to ensure high performance.

Results

Up to 90% online performance improvement
50% batch performance improvement and 50% infrastructure cost savings
Full control enhances customer satisfaction

Challenges

Italy-based IT team had limited control over Bulgaria-based production systems
5,000 daily batch jobs required some level of manual assistance
AIX skills shortage in Bulgaria
Slow performance affected end-user productivity

To manage a complex manufacturing and inventory environment, E.Miroglio deploys a production management application hosted in Bulgaria, the location of the main production sites. This application was IBM mainframe-based, which was expensive to maintain and support and offered limited flexibility. The organization decided that a first step to create a more flexible and cost-effective environment would be to migrate the z/OS solution to AIX, using TXSeries for online CICS transaction processing. For batch processing, the move to AIX converted all mainframe JCL scripts to Unix shell scripts.

E.Miroglio’s distributed workforce of over 500 solution users accessed the AIX backend environment through a suite of OpenText™ host communication and terminal emulation solutions: OpenText™ Reflection™ Desktop, OpenText™ Host Access for the Cloud, and OpenText™ Host Access Management and Security Server.

Although enjoying the cost benefits of not maintaining a full mainframe environment, E.Miroglio still felt improvements could be made. The team engaged with OpenText and adopted OpenText™ Micro Focus™ Enterprise Developer for Windows. This meant that solution developers could work on active software development and testing from any Windows machine, at any location. OpenText™ AccuRev is used to dynamically control all “in progress” changes for the development organization by graphically modelling the development process. The OpenText host communication and terminal emulation solutions and are then leveraged to deploy the new code onto the AIX infrastructure. This gave more direct control over the infrastructure management and the software development lifecycle.

Still, even though the AIX environment met most requirements for a time, the team was clear that after more than 10 years, its limitations were now hindering business innovation. Maurizio Chiavazza, System and Network Administrator with E.Miroglio, explains: “We process about 5,000 batch jobs every 24 hours and unfortunately this required some manual assistance, managed through a solution we had developed ourselves. As our company grows, so do the batch jobs and the time it takes to process them. We also felt it was time to standardize our environment with a more modern toolset. It was difficult to find the specialist AIX skills we needed to maintain and support the platform in Bulgaria. A move away from AIX would also give us more direct control in Italy. Having a more cost-effective and mainstream platform would allow us to be more flexible and respond to changing business requirements faster.”

Working closely together with OpenText Professional Services, we leveraged [OpenText] Micro Focus Enterprise Server to deploy an efficient and stable x86-based platform, giving us full control over our production environment, even though we are based in different countries.

Maurizio Chiavazza
System and Network Administrator, E.Miroglio

Solution

24/7 E.Miroglio operation selected OpenText Micro Focus Enterprise Server to move to a standardized and simplified x86-based platform. This large-scale migration benefits from reusing business-critical components captured in 12,000 COBOL programs.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Micro Focus™ Enterprise Server

Micro Focus Enterprise Server is a secure and reliable multi-platform production server to replatform IBM z/OS applications. It supports continued application modernization and integration with the selected platform including cloud based service offerings

Migrating 12,000 COBOL programs in a 24/7 operation requires a delicate approach

The team realized that OpenText™ Micro Focus™ Enterprise Server could accelerate the digital transformation to an alternative platform. This solution is designed to reuse unique and business-critical core applications and data, deploying them onto alternative infrastructures as part of a modernization journey.

With over 12,000 COBOL-based programs to replatform, and a 24/7 operation that would not tolerate downtime, planning this move was of the utmost importance. The team was clear that an x86-based Linux platform would provide the flexibility they were looking for, as well as infrastructure cost savings, and future opportunities for modernization. As part of the aim to standardize and simplify the environment, all Unix shell scripts were converted back to JCL with Micro Focus Enterprise Server. The E.Miroglio team historically has more mainframe JCL expertise and it was difficult to maintain the Unix shell scripts after the move to AIX. The team can now comfortably manage the JCL scripts from Italy.

Complex migration made easier by successful collaboration

E.Miroglio engaged with OpenText Professional Services to create a detailed game plan that outlined every step of the replatforming project. This involved running parallel environments for four months in which all transactions were captured and checked against each other to ensure the results were consistent in both environments. With a high transaction volume, it was key to ensure that the new x86 environment could deliver a similar or preferably better performance. The team deployed OpenText™ LoadRunner™ to simulate a heavy CICS load and stress test the system extensively.

“Working with the OpenText Professional Services consultants was a pleasure,” says Claudio Geuna, Functional Programmer Analyst with E.Miroglio. “They helped simplify our program and data structure and standardize our systems. The collaboration resulted in a great deal of knowledge transfer so that our team is now well-equipped to manage the ongoing maintenance and support of the new platform. This was a very complex migration with many integration points. The few issues that were encountered were dealt with quickly and expertly. The expertise of the combined team, the capabilities of the Micro Focus Enterprise Suite, and the long testing period all contributed to its resounding success.”

This was a very complex migration with many integration points. The expertise of the combined team, the capabilities of the Enterprise Suite, and the long testing period all contributed to its resounding success.

Claudio Geuna
Functional Programmer Analyst, E.Miroglio

Results

Moving from AIX to x86 Linux gave huge performance improvements, boosting end-user productivity. Hardware and skills for the new platform are much more cost-effective. The company now serves customers better, with full control over production systems.

Incredible performance improvements and 50% infrastructure cost savings

The switchover to the new platform was smooth and safe, with no disruption to the business. Online and batch transactions are now managed through Micro Focus Enterprise Server. The move was completely transparent to the more than 500 end-users. What they did notice however was the incredible performance improvement, with some departments reporting a 90 percent improvement. Geuna talked to the billing department: “My colleagues told me it used to take up to 15 minutes to generate and send an invoice, because the system performance would slow the process. After the Micro Focus Enterprise Server replatforming, invoices are completed and sent in seconds, practically real-time: a massive productivity boost for the team.”

Nightly batch operations are fully automated and complete 50 percent faster which is a great benefit for a 24/7 company with thousands of daily transactions. Although cost savings were not the main objective of this project, Chiavazza is happy to note that standard x86 Linux hardware costs about 50 percent of the AIX hardware of the previous platform. Thanks to the standardization, maintaining and supporting the new platform will also be far more cost-effective. More importantly, it will be easier to find skilled resources as AIX specialists were difficult to find and expensive to employ.

Chiavazza concludes: “Working closely together with OpenText Professional Services, we leveraged Micro Focus Enterprise Server to deploy an efficient and stable x86-based platform, giving us full control over our production environment, even though we are based in different countries. This enables us to serve our customers better. We simplified and standardized our programs and processes, and our end-users are delighted with the improved performance on both batch and transaction levels.”