Lince Group

LINCE Group migrate all their EAE (LINC II / LDA) and COBOL legacy applications to JAVA2/SQL Server using XSEED tools, taking a leap in technology and productivity.

For more than 65 years of existence and tradition on manufacturing activity, the LINCE Group has been accumulating important experience with technology, especially in the last 20 years.

LINCE Group is a private Brazilian group and their main companies are PLASVALE (plastic manufacturer), NOVELSUL and CIRCULO (fiber manufacturers for textile industries). They have more than 1200 employees and produce goods to internal and external markets.

LINCE CORPORATE APPLICATION

In the course of last years, LINCE have invested in building an integrated ERP, covering all their business areas. They called it SINGE application.

SINGE application was composed of 2.300 on line transactions (EAE ISPECs) and 1.500 batch programs (EAE Reports), totalizing more than 1.6 million of LDL/EAE lines of code (more than 20 million of generated COBOL code).

The needs

SINGE application was originally developed using UNISYS EAE (LINCII/LDA) and was deployed on a mainframe. Although robust and stable, this mainframe platform costs were incompatible with LINCE business; therefore, LINCE decied to move their SINGE ERP to the open IT platform in search of competitiveness and contracting flexibility, besides all of its implicit advantages.

LINCE group had already some experience with open servers and MS-SQL, obtaining excellent results with its use. For that reason they could anticipate the economy in migrating their legacy ERP to that platform.

Other important reason to migrate was the availability of information on the new technology. Users could produce themselves their own reports, graphics, sheets and others.

There was no way back. Migration project became a priority for IT area and all the LINCE Group.

After an accurate research of migration solutions in the market, LINCE selected XSEED, based on the technology used and in high reliability in executing similar migration projects.

The Project

It started on August, 2003 with Java training of the IT Team in charge of the legacy application maintenance. After that, the project advanced quickly and was concluded in January, 2004, 5 months after its beginning.

Project success was attributed to the efficiency of the XSEED migration and maintenance tools, proper methodology used on project management and high professionalism of XSEED consultants. In the other side, participation of LINCE IT professional and executives in all phases of the project was fundamental to conclude it within the expectations.

In late January, 2004, rigorously within planned timeframe, UNISYS mainframe was powered off and SINGE application started smoothly running on open platform. Around 300 end users started to operate the migrated application, with no need of additional training, once application kept same functionality as before its migration .

Technical team and end users

The LINCE professional team, with large skills on UNISYS mainframe environment, was trained on JAVA/SQL. As an additional migration project’s benefit, application maintenance productivity increased considerably, valorizing the team, and re-inserting those professionals on the working market with the new knowledge they acquired.

End users are very satisfied by the fact that they have obtained more productivity in accessing information. Now, data is available through BI and office tools, as MS Office accessing directly MS SQL Server.

Other benefits obtained with the project:

. Reduction in the on line programs response time;

. Reduction in batch programs executing time;

. Savings on IT investments;

. Reduction in the IT operational costs