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Case Studies
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INFINITE Corporation enjoys significant industry experience and many client engagements. |
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Company
Caterpillar specializes in the manufacturing and sales of heavy equipment.
Caterpillar is a Fortune 500 company that operates globally from
worldwide offices and is based in Illinois, USA.
Project
Provide efficient connectivity and distributed processing for worldwide
dealer network. Deliver graphical, ODBC-connectable Windows-based
software written for the System/36.
Challenge
Preserve integrity of vital dealer system data. Provide low-risk upgrade
path to modern relational database and graphical interface.
Solution
BABY/36 running on Windows NT Servers supporting 1000’s of users.
Result
Open system connectivity for stable RPG code. ODBC access to legacy data
allows staged migration to relational database system, graphical
presentation to dealer network.
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Stable, mature applications needed upgrades
Caterpillar was managing their international dealer network VIA AS/400’s,
Advanced and System/36’s supporting 1000’s of users in the hundreds of
locations. The applications supported dealer operations from order entry
to planning, delivery, and invoicing. The IBM Midrange systems helped
control these dealer processes.
These key applications were stable and mature, but they didn't cover all
our current functional requirements. They needed upgrades -with no
further support for the System/36 environment from IBM and a dealer
network that spanned the globe, we needed a solution from a global
company with reliable support.
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INFINITE Corporation solutions reduced delays and risks
We looked at packages such as SAP, but none fit our business needs. We
considered rewriting the existing applications for PC platforms, but we
were concerned about the time required, costs, and the risks of errors
in the data migration."
The result of Caterpillar's analysis: A BABY/36 solution was much faster,
avoided the data migration risks, and gave lower total costs than
modifying a PC-based product. The choice was INFINITE Corporation.
Caterpillar moved to BABY/36 running on Windows servers, deployed
globally. Caterpillar also does EDI operations with other Caterpillar
operations from an additional Windows Servers. They use INFINITE
Software's ODBC drivers to extract messages from RPG files, and then
transfer the data using communications code developed by INFINITE
Software.
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Conversion came in two steps
Caterpillar went live with the first of two migration steps: Existing code
running under BABY/36. INFINITE Corporation managed the conversion. At
start-up, performance was slow in certain sorting functions. INFINITE
Software traced these to load balancing issues among NT processes and
wrote code to correct the problem.
Within 90 days, we were seeing fast and reliable performance with the
legacy applications.
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Next step: extend the applications
With the migration complete, Caterpillar's next step is to extend their
applications. INFINITE Corporation has proposed a component-based-framework
approach that will greatly improve connectivity.
The INFINITE Corporation solution lets Visual Basic programs call existing
RPG components. Caterpillar can keep their mature, tested RPG code while
adding Visual Basic extensions for new functionality and a graphical
presentation.
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"The INFINITE Corporation approach also lets us migrate our data to a
modern relational database in small pieces, while we access the
unmigrated parts using INFINITE Corporation's ODBC capabilities. That gives
us time to clean and test the data, which reduces risk."
"INFINITE Corporation has worked hard to understand our business needs, they
respond quickly and intelligently to our problems, and the level of
support is excellent. We're extremely pleased with the relationship."
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| AT INFINITE Corporation, OUR GOALS ARE SIMPLE: |
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TRADEMARKS
Copyright © 2010 INFINITE Corporation. IBM Midrange,AS/400,
OS/400 and System/36 are registered trademarks of the IBM Corporation.Windows,
Internet Explorer, Visual Basic,VB Scripting are registered trademarks of
Microsoft. INFINITEweb, INFINITE BI, INFINITEiSeries, INFINITE 36 are registered trademarks of INFINITE Corporation. All other
product and brand names are registered trademarks of their respective companies. No part of this document may be reproduced without written permission of INFINITE Corporation.
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