DB Schenker Finland Case Study

Using X-Analysis & TD/OMS to support, maintain & develop a legacy transport management system

How Proximity has supported DB Schenker Finland maintain their business-critical TMS Software with X-Analysis & TD/OMS

About the Company

DB Schenker is one of the world’s largest transportation and logistics service providers, with over 91,000 employees working across 2,000 offices in 130 countries worldwide.

Supporting CIEL & Opera

Maintaining existing system relevance and preparing for the future

Language challenges

Using X-Analysis removes language challenges, while TD/OMS strengthen development processes

Bridging IBM i skills gap

Deploying our IBM i developers supplements in-house IT teams

"As we’re is looking at both English and Finnish documentation, with X-Analysis, we don’t necessarily have to be able to translate a field name or a file name, we just have to know the key between the two database files, and X-Analysis tells you that information."

Anthony Whalley, IBM i Developer, Proximity

Supporting IBM i applications into the future

Supporting Opera & developing new, next generation applications

For many years, Proximity has developed, supported and maintained business-critical IBM i applications for DB Schenker across Europe, building a long-standing, close and mutually beneficial working relationship. So, when DB Schenker Finland was looking for a company to not only support and maintain Opera, their domestic IBM i-based TMS, Opera, but also to get involved in exciting ‘next generation’ projects, integrations and new IBM i application development, they came to us.

IT workers at a computer working on a task

Routes, loading & POD

Running business-critical processes

Developed in-house over many years, Opera is, unsurprisingly, their core domestic system, covering their transportation operations, from route and load planning to proof of delivery through a PDA based app. Orders come into Opera via EDI, from customers through their web booking portals, or from interfaces with other cross-border parts of the business. A significant portion of the shipments and financial processes are automated.

IBM i skills shortage

A resource shortage for a legacy IBM i system

As with many businesses running IBM i applications, there has been a steady reduction in DB Schenker Finland’s in-house IBM i development skills due to retirement and developers moving onto new roles. Although Opera is still operating today – delivering an excellent, consistent and highly reliable service – they needed a way to supplement their internal IT team and ensure that Opera remained as relevant to the business as it did when first developed. This meant not only simply supporting and maintaining the application, but being able to develop new interfaces between Opera and other third party applications.

IBM i resources

IBM i specialists supplement DB Schenker's internal team

In order to provide maintenance and support services for Opera – and deliver new functionality and build the data bridges for exchanging information between Opera and other applications, Proximity provides DB Schenker Finland with two IBM i developers to supplement their IT team on a day-to-day operational basis supporting development on both the API modernisation side and the RPG side.

Onboarding & knowledge transfer

Knowledge transfer and overcoming language barriers with X-Analysis

Once appointed, it was essential for the Proximity team to quickly get up-to-speed on the underlying application architecture and how it has been developed over the years. Unfortunately, there was limited documentation – and the documentation they did have was in Finnish. Although the need for thorough knowledge transfer was apparent, it was understandably not practical to manually write out reams of documentation translated into English. The answer was X-Analysis.

Documenting applications

IBM i application documentation regardless of language

With X-Analysis all the application architecture is documented in one place and is easily accessible. We can look at one element of the application in X-Analysis and quickly understand what other parts of the application, or third-party applications for that matter, could be affected if we make a change in that file. It is easy to know what each program is called and why they’re being called, and to find all the database files related to a single program.

TD/OMS & X-Analysis

Combining application documentation with change management

Working in tandem, and closely integrated, TD/OMS source management capabilities ensure that any changes that are made are updated in the X-Analysis’ repository. In large development teams, implementing TD/OMS can have a significant impact on reducing the likelihood of errors. Using TD/OMS for source management really helps to avoid mistakes by reducing the risk of developers making changes to the wrong version of the source code and, in doing so, reintroducing bugs that were fixed in other versions. Deploying TD/OMS has also removed the majority of manual tasks in which mistakes are likely to happen.

“In the initial phase, X-Analysis tidied up all the source code. It gave us the ability to be able to list all the objects where the source was different to the actual data, so we could get that fixed quickly. Each of those mismatches is just a disaster waiting to happen: a bug waiting to be introduced. We’re now supporting and maintaining around 30,000 objects in the X-Analysis libraries."

Rick Butler, Project Manager, Proximity