Case Study: GroupMT achieves agile, automated manufacturing with Rogue Wave Software (Zend PHP on IBM i)

GroupMT Masters Agile Manufacturing with Zend

GroupMT, a leading European provider of quality and process management solutions for heat treatment and surface engineering, faced the challenge of modernizing a “green screen” ERP running on IBM i to improve document management, maintenance, manufacturing execution and data access across 50 plants. To gain an open, flexible development platform without rewriting legacy code, GroupMT selected Rogue Wave Software’s Zend PHP application platform (including Zend Studio, Zend Server and Zend Framework) to build web-based apps and integrate with the IBM i back end.

Rogue Wave Software delivered a Zend-based solution on IBM i that produced reporting, maintenance, document-management and MES applications: the first app went live in under three months, document handling scaled to 20,000 items/day, and the company reclaimed 10–12 man‑hours per day. Performance was optimized from 1–2 seconds to 50 ms page loads, the team can spin up 60–70 Zend Server instances and run the MES on 100+ devices, and deployments/rollbacks take about one second—resulting in improved reporting accuracy, productivity, greener document workflows and significant cost savings across GroupMT’s operations.

GroupMT

Rainer Schmitz

Head of IT