ASNA Success Stories
Extending and enhancing the IBM i and Microsoft platforms since 1982
Manufacturing - Steel Heat Treating
Region
North America and beyond
Project type
IBM i RPG migration to ASNA Visual RPG (the precursor to ASNA Encore RPG)
Lines of code migrated
300k
Database
Microsoft SQL Server
Products
ASNA Monarch, Visual RPG, DateGate for SQL Server
Customer Profile
An 80+ year-old US-based manufacturing company specializes in steel heat treating. It is one of the largest steel heat treating facilities in the United States.
Business Challenge
The company’s decades-old custom-built RPG shop floor application had a long and successful track record. However, its old character-based user interface was constraining the things the application needed to do. The company needed to modernize not just the UI, but also integrate some of the application’s business processes with business partners and third-party services.
Options Considered
The company needed an upgrade path for its application that would deliver the maximum functionality with the least disruption to IST overall operation. Rewriting the application in C# was briefly considered, but that was considered too costly and time-consuming.
The company determined that the most productive path to modernizing its decades-old shop floor RPG application was to migrate it to Microsoft .NET and migrate its IBM i DB2 database to SQL Server.
Why ASNA?
When the company considered its needs and options closely, it decided to build its migration strategy around ASNA’s Monarch and ASNA Visual RPG. The company felt that ASNA had the best offering for its long term business needs.
For this project, the company chose ASNA Visual RPG (the precursor to ASNA Encore RPG) as the target source language because it was easy for its RPG programmers to transition their skills.
Implementation
The company initially considered performing the migation themselves. However, it quickly became obvious that the scope of the migration was too large for its internal developer team. The ASNA Services Team stepped in to perform the RPG application assessment and migration. The entire migration process, from start to finish, took approximately four months to complete.
One of the concerns the company had was training long-time employees to use a browse-based user interface. However, Monarch-migrated application have excellent fidelity with the keystroke patterns of the original RPG application. However, with just a little training, the users (some of whom who had been using fixed-function terminals since the Shop Floor application was first introduced in the late 1980s) quickly adapted to the new browser-based user interface.
Business Benefit
With the migrated application deployed, the company says its able to improve mistake proofing by providing tailored processing instructions and including images of items being processed.
The company estimates that moving off IBM i saves it up to 15k USD a year, while at the same time offering the company new opportunities to continue evolving the Shop Floor system with new features.