Migration of Adabas/Natural Applications at Schering - Consist ...

Reports
Logistics in Pharmaceutical Sales
Migration of Adabas/Natural
Applications at Schering
By Michael Nogalski
Schering AG is migrating their logistics systems from a MVS mainframe to a HP/Unix and achieving
significant performance improvements as well as a considerable cost saving.
Schering is a research-oriented pharmaceutical
company that has focused
their activities in four commercial
areas: fertility control and hormone
therapy, diagnostics and radiopharmacology,
dermatology and special
therapeutics for serious illnesses.
Schering‘s total sales for 2001 were
over 4.8bn Euro, 90% of which were
revenues from businesses based
outside of Germany. Schering‘s global
success is divided over more than
130 subsidiaries and associated
companies worldwide.
The supply of pharmaceutical products
to retail companies worldwide
as well as the production planning for
European-based production compa-
nies is controlled by uniform logistics
systems which were operated on a
MVS mainframe up until the end of
2001. These applications were developed
under Adabas/Natural.
Migration = Saving costs
photo: Schering
It is only natural that demands on
logistics systems increased with time
as the volume of data and the number
of users increase. Therefore, it was
necessary to optimize the performance
of the systems.
Upgrading the mainframe would
have meant a significant increase in
costs for the required licenses due
to a higher level class of hardware.
While searching for alternatives,
Schering made the decision after
consultation with MaK Data System
to migrate the Adabas/Natural applications
to a Unix environment.
Migrating to Unix can decrease overhead
costs. In addition to that, the
application performance can be improved
if the appropriate hardware is
used. If the demands on the logistics
systems increase further, additional
memory or processors will not entail
additional licensing costs. Additional
advantages can be gained by
possibly integrating external systems,
which are more affordable under
Unix.
22 MaK DATA \ News May 2002 / 16

Project Scope
With MaK Data System‘s support, the
logistics systems were converted
from the MVS computer to a HP/Unix
environment and put into production.
The emphasis of the activities, which
MaK Data System coordinated, was
on technological consulting as well
as converting the job control.
During the system migration, the
MVS jobs were converted into Unix
shell scripts, a job control system and
an archive system were installed and
configured, and users and printers
were set up in the new environment.
To achieve this, approximately 3,000
batch jobs were revised from the old
IBM job control language into Unix
shell script and redesigned. At the
same time, the number of jobs had
to be dramatically reduced to ca.
1,000 scripts.
Parallel to the conversion of the IT
logistic, an infrastructure for job
control, job output and list administration
had to be installed on Unix.
The challenges
Around 10,000 Natural objects (programs,
screen masks and texts) were
converted and adapted by internal
project groups. However, since Natural
can not conceal all of the differences
of various operating systems
and processors, various modifica-
Overview at the First Glance
The requested colorful screen presentation for logistics and inventory
management processes
May 2002 / 16 MaK DATA \ News 23

Report
tions had to be made. For example:
It was necessary to make changes
due to the different character sets and
a consequent alteration in sorting
processes; alphanumerical fields had
to be redefined with numerical content;
and numerous international special
characters or symbols had to be
modified.
The logistics systems are quite attractively
designed in the MVS mainframe
system due to the use of various
colors for presenting information,
inverse display and cursor selection.
To recreate this under Unix was partly
time consuming and therefore costly.
It also came to our attention that
certain Natural functions behaved
differently under Unix and in some
cases did not function properly. This
was the case especially with color
displays and inverse displays. Software
AG was asked to take the appropriate
remedial measures for this.
Special thanks go to Schering AG –
which has paved the way for future
projects with other Adabas/Natural
users.
Support programs were set up and
used for different tasks during the migration.
One of these programs was
a program that automatically converts
OS/390 JCL into Unix scripts. These
programs made the migration process
easier and accelerated the migration
on the operating system side
as well as on the Adabas/Natural end.
Ca. 70 GB of the Adabas database
were transferred and converted from
the MVS mainframe to the HP/UX
system. The database is secured
online since the applications must be
available around the clock. This
guarantees operation seven days a
week, 24 hours a day. The logistics
systems are supplied daily with upto-date
information from the host. To
achieve this, an automated database
replication process was implemented
which replicates the information daily.
Summary
Responsible for system side of the project: from left:
Jochen fitting (Schering)
Rainer Schüler (Schering)
Dieter Schmidt (Schering)
The realization of the project is a
huge success for all those who participated,
especially because the logistics
systems have been running
since the beginning of the year on
HP/UX and almost all of the known,
initial problems have been solved.
It has been confirmed that the performance
of online as well as batch
applications has been considerably
improved. The company‘s expectations
with respect to costs have also
been met. Considering the estimated
remaining run time of the logistics
Specifications of the
logistics systems:
3,000 batch jobs (today 1,000
Unix scripts), 10,000 Natural
objects, 70 GB of Adabas data,
600 users worldwide, system
availability: seven days 24 hours
operation
The IT systems for logistics are
now operated on a HP/UX L2000
with 4 x 440 MHz as well as 4
GB RAM. The Adabas database
is located on a Storage Sub-System
HP XP/512, which is
connected via a Storage Area
Network (SAN).
systems, savings of several million
Euro were achieved. ■
For further information contact:
Michael Nogalski
Phone: +49 (0)431 / 3993-532
eMail: nogalski@makdata.de
Project team application side: from left:
Mihaly Gyapjas (MaK Data System)
Dr. Wolfgang Peemöller (Schering)
Stefan Schädlich (APL Software GmbH)
Heiko Harmsen (Schering)
Klaus Büttner (APL Software GmbH)
Dietmar Labitzke (Schering)
24 MaK DATA \ News May 2002 / 16