Buschle & Lepper (SC/Brazil)

The Company

Migrated their LINC II / EAE to Java2 / Oracle / Aix and deactivated an old UNISYS mainframe, achieving strong increasing on services level and flexibility on their technological modernization project.

In 12/01/1943 the brothers Baltasar and Hilario Buschle and a friend of theirs, Fernando Max Lepper have founded Buschle & Lepper. Today, this company represents an important role on Joinville City and Brazil progress.

After the beginning, as a national and import paper dealer, Buschle & Lepper have built its own chemical and agricultural factory. Their products are present on Brazil and in many countries: Americas - including USA –, Europe and Asia. Oriented to the internal and external market needs, the Magnesium Division, located on Barra do Sul SC – Brazil, have developed technology to extract magnesium from the sea water to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. There are 22 types of magnesium and aluminum as oxides, hydroxides, carbonates and chlorides.

Needs and Decisions

Using UNISYS mainframe since 1981, B&L have realized how important was updating their technological park. They wanted to better service their internal and external users.

After rigorous studies and analysis of available technologies in the market, the Company decided to adopt the JAVA and Oracle technologies to modernize their business applications.

Then, B&L chosen XSEED migration solution for their migration and modernization project, based on the large experience on those kind of projects and due to excellent references they have learned about XSEED company.

IBM was selected to provide the open server to support this project, a RISC Regatta was chosen. It was a great choice due to its reliability and performance, sufficient to support B&L operations and their evolution for a long period.

However, they were in a hurry to initiate operations on the new platform. The Unisys mainframe maintenance contract had expired and B&L didn’t want to renew it. They could not take the risks.

The Project

The volumes of the project were:

A) On-line transactions - 380;
B) Batch Programs - 690;
C) Global logics - 60

The total time spent on the project was 4 months, since the first project’s meeting until the final application deployment. Professionals from B&L, with support of XSEED consultants and Objetiva consultants (a XSEED business partner) achieved a great success, strictly observing project’ schedules and budget.

Also, they have had a substantial increase in on-line transactions performance.

The XSEED approach does not include only legacy applications migration. It also includes professional team training on the new technology. Consequently, B&L IT team, which have a strong knowledge on customer’s application, was trained on the XSEED Development Tools and on JAVA language. Today, the same legacy team that participated of the migration project is completely comfortable with maintaining and evolving the application on JAVA & ORACLE platforms.

Benefits

B&L increased its developers’ productivity due to XSEED tools flexibility. New functionalities are being aggregated to the application in an easier and faster way than beforeIn the end users point of view, today they have a friendlier interface (html), application performance is much better than before and batch routines timeframe were substantially reduced.

They can also directly browse reports or download it in MS EXCEL/ MS WORD files. They were freed to take advantage of available information.

Another great side effect was the availability (up time) of the new platform which has been 100%, during this time there were no hardware or software fails.

This modernization project allowed B&L to keep focus on company optimization, improving business process and resources utilization.