Case Study: DaimlerChrysler achieves over 50% cost savings and improved service levels with OpenText

Moving mission-critical application achieves over 50% cost savings and improves service levels

DaimlerChrysler South Africa, which supports a network of 100 dealerships, relied on a mainframe-based parts supply chain system to keep service departments stocked and customers served. Seeking significant IT cost reductions, the company tasked SPI Consulting with moving the mission‑critical after‑sales, parts distribution and supply chain application from a 70 MIPS mainframe to IBM AIX — a complex effort because the system combined more than one million lines of COBOL and 7,000 Natural programs using ADABAS and had to support 1,700 users (about 500 concurrent) with both technologies interacting on the same terminals.

SPI Consulting partnered with MigrationWare and Micro Focus to redeploy the application using Micro Focus Enterprise Server, MigrationWare’s Native ADABAS precompiler and integration software that resolved terminal-control conflicts without rewriting code. The migration was completed in 10 months, delivering comparable or better performance and availability, an ROI in 24 months and dramatic annual savings of over 50%, freeing resources for future IT projects.

DaimlerChrysler

Alan McNabb

IT Manager—Parts