4-page Case Study - Posted 9/11/2006
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Mainframe-to-Windows Migration Saves Frozen Food Producer More Than $1 Million
The Schwan Food Company, one of the world’s leading branded frozen food manufacturers, needed an alternative to a mainframe, which was complex, costly, and unable to support the company’s aggressive growth. Its solution: migrate its custom business applications to the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 operating system and the Microsoft .NET Framework. With the help of solution provider Cognizant Technology Solutions, Schwan eliminated its mainframe in a complete mainframe-to-Windows Server migration that will add more than U.S.$1 million to its bottom line each year by reducing administration and development costs for increased efficiency, and increasing revenues by speeding time-to-benefit for new solutions. The Windows Server solution adds capacity that the existing mainframe lacked and the new .NET-connected applications are boosting productivity throughout the company.
Situation
Sometimes diversity is a good thing; sometimes it isn’t. Take The Schwan Food Company, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of branded frozen foods with 22,000 employees and operations in five countries. The company makes and sells a highly eclectic and successful range of frozen foods under such brand names as Mrs. Smith’s, Freschette, Chicago Town Pizza, Red Baron, Coyote Grill, Asian Sensations, Schwan’s Home Service and more. Its distribution model is equally diverse, including supermarkets, schools, the Internet, restaurants, and home delivery.
But diversity wasn’t such a good thing when it came to the IT infrastructure that supports this large and growing enterprise. The company ran two platforms—a 450 MIPS Hitachi 48E mainframe with OS/390 for its custom business applications, and computers running the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 operating system for its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning and other standard applications. That in turn led Schwan to support three databases—DB2 on the mainframe, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 and Oracle on the Windows®-based servers—and six application environments.
“It was too much,” says Kate McNulty, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “We needed to reduce complexity in order to reduce operational costs—the redundant costs of maintaining so many environments.”
In addition to reducing costs, McNulty and her colleagues wanted to make the company’s approximately 30 custom business solutions easier to use and hence more useful for the more than 10,000 employees who relied upon them daily. Schwan needed a more agile environment, with the flexibility to quickly create or enhance applications to meet changing market needs.
These requirements led Schwan to the decision that its mainframe had to be retired. The machine was straining at capacity and couldn’t be expanded incrementally or cost-effectively to support continuing growth due to existing 32-bit technology. With more than seven million lines of code built over 25 years, the system’s software was difficult and expensive to maintain, let alone upgrade. The mainframe’s inflexible “green screens” didn’t support the widespread, easy use that the company wanted. And the situation was getting worse with the pool of qualified mainframe technicians and vendors continuing to dry up, putting the business at increasing risk.
When Hitachi decided to get out of the mainframe business to focus on server computers running Windows Server, Schwan faced the prospect of running an unsupported system, Schwan considered upgrading to an IBM 64-bit z/OS-based mainframe, but that would have meant a 40 percent increase in already-high maintenance costs, without addressing any of the company’s problems with the high costs and poor agility in the mainframe environment.
Solution
Schwan chose to migrate its mainframe-based applications to its Windows Server-based environment, which includes the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of the Windows operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
“A fundamental requirement of this project was to move to a platform with performance equal to or greater than the mainframe,”
 | The mainframe gave us a single point of failure. With the move to Windows Server and .NET, we worked to exceed the mainframe in availability. |  | | John Mount,
Senior Director of IS Infrastructure, The Schwan Food Company | |
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says McNulty. “The move to Windows wouldn’t just consolidate our environment. It would consolidate our environment on a platform we already knew, in which we were already invested, and which we knew we could use successfully to support our continued growth.”
How to Get There?
Schwan knew where it wanted to go—but how would it get there? The size and complexity of the mainframe environment—913 database tables containing more than 900 GB of data, seven million lines of code, 100 interfaces to external systems, 400 client/server applications accessing legacy data, and insufficient documentation on the mainframe systems—led to a new challenge: how to implement the migration without negative impact on continuing operations.
To address that challenge—and to help design and implement the mainframe migration—Schwan turned to Cognizant, a Teaneck, New Jersey–based Microsoft Certified Solution Provider with more than 31,000 employees worldwide. Schwan chose Cognizant for several reasons, including its highly developed onsite/offshore outsourcing model, its mix of technological expertise, its Microsoft .NET Competency Center, and its large roster of Microsoft-certified professionals. Cognizant also has a proven track record in supporting IT at Schwan over the previous five years. These factors would allow Cognizant to quickly ramp up for the project and stick to a cost-effective development budget.
Making Choices
One of the first issues Cognizant tackled was how to plan and schedule a complex migration of inter-related applications to mitigate business risk. It conducted a portfolio analysis of the Schwan mainframe applications and recommended dividing them into five releases and porting them in a specific order designed to minimize impact on the business. Each release consisted of a set of applications that were closely related to each other but not to the applications in the other release sets. Corporate applications were migrated first through two releases, followed by the “Toolbox” for corporate and field personnel, financial and payroll applications, and the final release of field-facing applications. This enabled the migration to be implemented in logical, manageable steps, without breaking relationships among applications.
Another question facing Schwan was whether to create new, native .NET-connected applications or to migrate its COBOL code by recompiling that code in COBOL.NET and middleware. The former approach would require a greater investment of development time and effort but would yield new applications that took full advantage of the speed, flexibility, and extensibility of the .NET Framework. The latter approach would be faster and cheaper to implement and would take advantage of the investment that Schwan had in its existing code, but it would not take full advantage of the .NET-based environment. Schwan chose the former approach, using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system and C# programming language.
“We entered this project to eliminate extra technologies to support. So we didn’t want to maintain both our COBOL code and a middleware layer,” says McNulty. “We were willing to invest to create a highly agile system that would support our growth and provide competitive advantage for years to come.”
| With Windows and .NET, we can save money and make money faster than we could with the mainframe. | | | Lisa Harmening, Senior Director of the Project Office, The Schwan Food Company | |
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For example, Schwan created a “Toolbox” portal that gives employees one place to go to access all of their applications. The portal shields the employee from the system’s underlying complexity. During the switchover period from DB2 to SQL Server, the company ran both databases and the Toolbox was programmed to know which database to draw from, based on which application the employee was using and where the company was in its release schedule.
When the time came to implement the field facing applications, Schwan faced the choice of a so-called “big bang,” or all-at-once, migration of the final release to the 10,000 employees who used them, or a “slow roll” to limited numbers of employees over an extended period.
“When we started, we anticipated a ‘big bang’ migration,” says John Mount, Senior Director of IS Infrastructure at Schwan. “But we quickly saw that wasn’t feasible due to the business risk it entailed. We were careful to communicate constantly with our employees throughout the project to get their support and one piece of feedback we received was that they would appreciate a slower approach to the deployment. We were glad to oblige.”
Flexibility in Deployment
That slow-roll approach was implemented over four months at the start of 2006. The resulting production infrastructure replaces the Hitachi 48E OS/390 with 22 Windows-based computer servers, plus 12 virtual servers.
The range of hardware includes IBM LS20 blade servers for reporting, HP DL 380 and DL 580 computers for application and batch processing, and a pair of Unisys ES7000 computers for the database. That broad range of hardware gives Schwan the ability to match application requirements to the precise level of hardware and computing power needed to meet those requirements.
Benefits
The migration from the mainframe to Windows Server has achieved Schwan’s goal of reducing complexity while maintaining or increasing performance levels. In addition, the company hopes to gain more than U.S.$1 million annually by retiring the mainframe platform, reducing development costs, speeding time-to-benefit for new solutions and reducing maintenance expense. The company also expects to gain greater business agility, system flexibility, and employee productivity throughout the company.
Speeds Development, Increases Revenues
By migrating completely from the mainframe to Windows Server and the .NET Framework, Schwan has reduced its seven million lines of mainframe code by 85 percent, to one million lines of code on Windows Server. Schwan finds that development for the .NET Framework, using Microsoft Visual Studio, is easier and faster than development for the mainframe. Because there is a vibrant pool of developers and vendors for .NET-connected solutions, the company expects to improve the operation of its development program.
The faster development on the Windows Server—based system delivers more than operational efficiency. By speeding its time to market for new solutions and increasing its business agility, Schwan can respond faster to business requests for new solutions and, thus, respond to more of those requests than it could on the mainframe. With more revenue-generating business solutions coming online more quickly, Schwan expects to improve relationships with customers and improve the efficiency of its supply chain.
“We are constantly evolving our system, enhancing current applications and adding new ones. These solutions enable our people to do their jobs better, to generate more revenue and to reduce the costs of doing business,” says Lisa Harmening, Senior Director of the Project Office at Schwan. “With Windows and .NET, we can save money and make money faster than we could with the mainframe.”
Enables Greater Reliability, Capacity
Beyond reducing complexity and increasing the bottom line, the migration to Windows Server and the .NET Framework gave Schwan about 30 percent more computing power and capacity than it had in the former, 450 MIPS mainframe environment. Schwan used these extra resources both to harden its solution for greater reliability and to provide the capacity for growth that it didn’t have on
| Our objectives going into this migration were to reduce the number of environments we were utilizing in order to reduce complexity, increase our agility, speed of delivery, and lower our overall costs. We accomplished our objectives. | | | Lisa Harmening, Senior Director of the Project Office, The Schwan Food Company | |
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the mainframe.
“The mainframe gave us a single point of failure,” says Mount. “With the move to Windows Server and .NET, we worked to exceed the mainframe in availability.”
For example, the use of application server pools contribute to self-resiliency and Web servers are load balanced for high availability. SQL Server databases are joined in an active/active cluster using failover clustering in SQL Server. Schwan sees 99.7 percent availability in the Windows Server environment after deducting unscheduled downtime—performance that is equal to what it saw on the mainframe.
The extra computing power also delivers spare capacity that Schwan didn’t have before. Schwan can easily build out incrementally by adding new servers, something that wasn’t possible with the mainframe. “Thanks to Windows Server and .NET, we’re prepared to support Schwan’s continued business growth,” says McNulty. “That wasn’t the case with the mainframe.”
Boosts Productivity Up to 60 Percent
Schwan is experiencing the positive impact of the mainframe-to-Windows Server migration not just within the company’s IT organization, but throughout the company.
The Windows graphical environment and the new Toolbox portal application have made navigation through the system far easier for employees. For example, Schwan estimates that new customer service managers become productive 10 percent faster than they could on the mainframe, because it’s easier for them to learn applications presented in the graphical and intuitive Windows interface. An inventory control application, specifically the item master functions, rewritten for the .NET Framework, reduced the number of screens employees need to navigate from eight to three—a decrease of more than 60 percent—boosting productivity in inventory management.
Schwan’s Home Service, Inc., a business unit of The Schwan Food Company, has reduced its monthly close from 10 days to 3 days as the result of eliminating the batch jobs formerly needed to synchronize data between the mainframe’s DB2 database and the company’s SQL Server and Oracle databases. As a result, executive management can spot financial concerns faster.
“Our objectives going into this migration were to reduce the number of environments we were utilizing in order to reduce complexity, increase our agility, speed of delivery, and lower our overall costs,” says Harmening. “We accomplished our objectives.”
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
The Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family helps organizations do more with less. Now you can run your IT infrastructure more efficiently, build better applications faster, and deliver the best infrastructure for enhancing user productivity. And you can do all this faster, more securely, and at lower cost.
For more information about Windows Server 2003, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Cognizant products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.cognizant.com
For more information about The Schwan Food Company products and services, call (507) 537-8517 or visit the Web site at: www.schwan.com
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