~90% of systems
in Cobol and VisualAge, accessing DB2
+6 million
customers
+1 million
deliveries per month
Success Stories >> Cost reduction and customer satisfaction on the Mainframe platform
Via Varejo, the administrator of the Casas Bahia and Pontofrio physical stores, adopted 3CON's services to optimize the performance of its mainframe systems, resulting in cost savings with the high platform and customer satisfaction.
According to Júlio Baião, IT director at Via Varejo, the mainframe culture is very strong at Via Varejo and has been for around 15 years, starting with Casas Bahia. Around 90% of its systems - including sales, deliveries, logistics, HR and even card transactions - run on the platform and were developed internally in Cobol and VisualAge, accessing DB2.
"A company of this size, with 6 million customers, a presence in 20 states, more than 1,000 stores, 61,000 employees, a million deliveries a month and a huge volume of daily transactions can't see any other platform than the mainframe to be able to handle this processing and support the company's technological evolution," said Baião.
The director explains that there are two objectives for Via Varejo with the performance optimization services on the high platform: the first is to improve the life and routine of the system's users; and the second is to reduce the use of MSUs (million service units), because when it comes to mainframes, the more processing power you use, the higher the costs.
"For example, if a program takes 1 second to run in stores, it probably doesn't represent a big problem for the user. But if that program runs thousands of times, that 1 second in total becomes a problem, not for the user at the end, but for the company, because it means wasting MSUs and therefore increasing costs," explains Baião. "If that time is reduced to 0.5 seconds, it may not make that much difference to the user, but it cuts the consumption of those thousands of transactions in half, which helps to reduce our software bill."
Thanks to the constant fine-tuning of the platform, Via Varejo has also been able to go ahead with its projects to modernize its IT resources without any setbacks. An example of this was the adoption of tablets by the sales, assembly, technical assistance and distribution teams at Casas Bahia and Pontofrio.
These new devices also access the information contained in the databases and programs that run on the mainframe. "The salesperson using the tablet has access to the same type of information as a salesperson accessing the company's systems on the fixed terminals. This has streamlined sales, deliveries and the entire customer service process. But we had to prepare for these thousands of daily queries to our mainframe databases," he explains.
3CON was responsible for optimizing the codes, together with an internal Via Varejo team, as well as maintaining mission-critical systems for the business. "These are robust systems, very stable and highly scalable, so much so that they support the company's operations even with all the growth we've achieved over the years, including the absorption of Ponto Frio itself," says Baião.
The work to improve performance began with a diagnosis of optimization opportunities within the entire base of Cobol and VisualAge systems and databases. "We observe the mainframe's performance on a daily basis, which applications and transactions are consuming the most MSUs. We look at the code and the database. Can we do things better and differently? Then we create an index, change the way we access it, change the entire program, if necessary. All of this is intelligence work that the people at 3CON help us to carry out," he says.
The executive reveals that with all the optimization and performance improvement work, 99.75% of transactions take less than 0.3 seconds to run, which is an excellent rate. "Even with this very good level of response, we still keep a close eye on our entire environment and look for opportunities to improve," he confesses.
For the second half of 2015, the work carried out by 3CON will enter a new phase. In addition to what has already been done, the consultancy will start to act preventively in relation to any and all mainframe code that is generated in Via Varejo's IT.
The teams will dedicate themselves to quality control of the code, establishing standards, as well as creating a database that simulates a production very close to reality in order to carry out the best possible tests. "The mainframe is the heart of our IT. We're going to work harder and harder to improve this environment in all its aspects," Baião concludes.
Source: IT Forum 365
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