Day-Timer Improves Its System and Personnel Productivity With Migration, Modernization Tools from Alchemy Solutions

Savings Achieved by Minimizing MIPS Usage, Faster Batch Processing and More Responsive Development Resources

BEND, Oregon, 21st October, 2009 – Alchemy Solutions, Inc. (www.alchemysolutions.com), 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. These tools would enable Day-Timer to migrate its applications to native Microsoft ASP.NET code to run as Web applications over the company’s intranet. Day-Timer could preserve its original business logic and its investment in that logic.

The migration included 1,600 applications and 1,300 batch jobs, and was completed over 15 months by a team of six developers. Instead of the IBM 2086-130, the Day-Timer ERP suite now runs on IBM X3755 dual-processor server hardware, an IBM DS4700 SAN, and Windows Server 2003.

"Day-Timer moved from the IBM mainframe to Windows Server primarily to reduce cost. It has done a remarkable job at that," said Dorney, "virtually eliminating the amount we previously spent on the mainframe." Instead of $725,000 per year, the Windows Server deployment costs Day-Timer just $48,000 per year, a reduction of 93 percent. In addition, Day-Timer eliminated the $22,000 cost of printing reports as employees now use reports online.

The move to Windows Server has also reduced maintenance requirements, enabling Day-Timer to redeploy the resources formerly devoted to a 12-person operations staff. Software development is easier too, enabling the company to redeploy the resources formerly devoted to three programmers.

Day-Timer kept the original look and feel of its user interface screens—although those screens are now accessed through an Internet Explorer Web browser—to avoid having to retrain workers. “90 percent didn’t even notice the difference,” said Dorney.

Although Day-Timer didn’t migrate to increase performance, it gained that benefit as well. Batch processes run 10 to 15 percent faster. The system now integrates more easily with third party systems and data, such as the company’s electronic data interchange system, which “wasn’t possible in the mainframe world,” said Dorney. And Day-Timer is easily integrating the Internet into its applications, such as a FedEx Web service for calculating shipping rates that’s integrated into Day-Timer’s shipping application.