Just-in-Time Recovery of OM Logistics

Having the right thing, at the right place and at the right time is all about logistics. With the objective of ‘just-in-time' supply and highly orgainzed goods flow, OM Logistics has built a considerable reputation by linking all the supply chain elements and providing a single window logistics service for its 500 clients in the corporate and multi-national automobile industry.

OM Logistics operates in an environment where the big players were constantly raising the stakes in respect of new technology but their own was unwieldy and outdated technology. Their business applications used character-based, command line development technology making them clunky to modify and difficult to modernize.

Out with the Old...

The company wanted more productive application development toolset with a contemporary, industry-standard developer experience that would exploit its existing investment in powerful COBOL-based applications and consignment-tracking technology to modernizing their mobile app.

"We require significant IT support to deliver the goods, but our Track & Trace application, which supports the company's core business modules including accounting, reporting, warehousing, HR, payroll and consignment tracking, was unwieldy and outdated," says SK Goel, Vice President, Information Technology, OM Logistics.

Choosing the Right Vendor

After going through various selection procedures, Micro Focus was selected by their leadership team as one of the best suited soultions for their business needs. After understanding their needs and challenges, Micro Focus suggested Visual COBOL for Eclipse as the best solution for them.

Why Rewrite-REUSE

Visual COBOL's philosophy of ‘reuse not rewrite' has enabled OM Logistics to progress its existing COBOL business rules to take advantage of new modern technologies, such as PHP. It also helped them in their future and planned initiatives-including the development of a mobile and PHP application interface, powered by proven, back-end COBOL applications-which can hit the launchpad.

"We opted for Visual COBOL with Eclipse to be in-line with the latest technology and move towards mobile and cloud development. I estimate its use has improved development efficiency by around 30%. We have already completed an application upgrade from Micro Focus COBOL to Visual COBOL and are now planning to develop a very valuable new mobile application to leverage our COBOL-based business rules," adds Goel.

Bringing Innovation to Core Applications

Because OM Logistics' IDE of choice was Eclipse and they wanted to reuse and enhance their mission-critical applications on a new business platform, so here are the following changes they achieved through this transition.

• They moved their ‘Track & Trace' application from Server Express to Visual COBOL to harvest all the benefits. Visual COBOL for Eclipse enables the creation and development of enterprise class applications that run on many platforms, including Unix, Linux, JVM, and the cloud.
• The management wanted to carry forward proven business rules and their existing application investment in track & trace into new contemporary architectures. Key functionality within its track and trace application could now be leveraged for new application development.
• Reusing existing code enabled the improvement of customer applications, including an immediate ‘virtual connect' upgrade.
• Re-purposing business rules also delivered a fast, but low risk approach to new innovations. Visual COBOL's flexibility puts the power to reinvent applications firmly in the client's hands.

Future Developments Made Easier

Visual COBOL delivered for OM in many ways. They included:

• Leveraging the latest industry-standard IDEs to modernize core applications
• Development of a mobile application to access COBOL systems
• Improvement of developer efficiency by 30%

"We now have a new, more flexible and cost-effective platform for development and we can support new interfaces and technologies quickly and easily. Moving to Visual COBOL seemed like a win-win situation for us. and it was," added Goel.