Two Times Faster Migration for Automotive Supplier

Ispirer Toolkit facilitated the optimization of application modernization for an automotive supplier. Through the implementation of automation, we successfully mitigated conversion errors and enhanced overall application efficiency.

Results

Background

Autobacs Seven Co., Ltd. is a retailer of automotive products and services based in Japan with subsidiaries in Asia and Europe. The company has more than 600 stores all over the world. The company offers vehicle repair, maintenance, sale and purchase, painting and vehicle inspection services. Specializing in a wide range of automotive products and services, Autobacs is recognized for its extensive network of stores that cater to car enthusiasts, DIY mechanics, and general automotive consumers. The company offers a diverse selection of automotive parts, accessories, tools, and maintenance services. Autobacs is also known for its car accessory retail stores, auto service centers, and its commitment to providing quality products to enhance the performance and appearance of vehicles. The company operates in Japan, France, China, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan. Autobacs Seven is headquartered in Koto-Ku, Tokyo, Japan.

Challenge

The client's application played a pivotal role in the daily operations of the business. The company had a COBOL application for working with Oracle and other databases. The client was looking for a company that would be able to migrate the application to Java as quickly as possible. Given the impressive size of the application, a manual migration would take at least 2 years.

The client selected the right company with great care, and eventually chose Ispirer because of the standout feature that sets us apart from competitors - the automated sql code conversion. In addition to the accelerated migration, the undisputed advantage of Ispirer Toolkit was the quality of the conversion. Due to the company's extensive migration experience in this area, it was decided to carry out a migration project with Ispirer Toolkit.

Solution

Our project was a collaborative effort with our partner, HAS. HAS serves as a system integrator, playing a crucial role in gaining a profound understanding of the Japanese clients' requirements. Their team possesses extensive knowledge of our product capabilities, and helps to overcome language barriers in communication with clients.

For successful implementation of the migration project from COBOL to Java, it was important for the client to test the tool and first verify the quality of the migration. To do this, the Ispirer team provided the demo version of the tool.

After successful testing of the tool, the customer purchased an Ispirer Toolkit license. It is worth noting that for a seamless migration from COBOL to Java, it was essential to use Ispirer Toolkit and a framework that facilitated conversion to the maximum. This framework is designed to implement the unique functionality of the source technology, which does not have direct equivalents in the target technology.

Due to Ispirer Toolkit and a framework, the conversion quality was close to perfect, which impressed the customer. However, in any migration projects there are constructions that require manual conversion. In this project, we suggested adding new conversion rules to Ispirer Toolkit to automate the conversion of specific instances.

Here are the cases that were customized for Autobacs:

• Since the client is located in Japan, there was a difficulty with Japanese characters. The size of the variables was taken into account in the algorithms of the initial application. Switching to Java presented challenges, particularly when dealing with Japanese language encodings. This is because the byte size of a string differs from the character size when using these encodings. At the same time, different hieroglyphs can take up a different number of bytes. We have expanded the framework to easily and conveniently determine the size of variables in Java in Japan encoding.
• Added flexible functionality for working with csv files.
• A new approach was taken to call sections and methods in Java at the client's request. Using this approach has resulted in significant reductions in the amount of code and the number of method calls.

The COBOL logic implies consistent calls of sections and paragraphs. Initially it was realized with the help of extra methods for both sections and paragraphs, that consistently called each other. The customer decided to get rid of calling section methods and implement calling the first paragraph method in each section. Now both options are available for future COBOL to Java migration projects.

After all the necessary changes were made, the customer received the tailor-made Ispirer solutions to transform the application at their side.

Outcome

It took 12 months to complete the app migration from COBOL to Java. In total, the client converted an application with 400K lines of code and more than 1000 files using the Ispirer Toolkit.

As a result, the client received an upgraded Java application in the shortest possible time. The Ispirer team received exceptional ratings from the client on the quality of the conversion, the speed of migration, the flexibility of the team and an adaptive approach to each client. The detailed feedback from HAS can be found in our Capterra profile.