Double Day
Doubleday operates book and music clubs with well over 500,000 members in Australia and New Zealand. It is a subsidiary of Bertelsmann AG, a German media group with interests in book clubs, publishing, music, printing, film, television and radio. Doubleday embarked on a number of challenges. Firstly to transport all of its COBOL applications on the current Prime system to an IBM AS/400, and secondly to rewrite and enhance the current system using a CASE tool. KAZ Computer services, an IBM business partner and the X-Analysis distributor for Australia, was contracted to support Doubleday in the conversion, documentation and re-engineering of its systems.
The first essential step was to gain an understanding of the size of the systems, the number of files and COBOL programs and the complexity involved in the conversion process. Doubleday Australia and KAZ Computer service chose X-Analysis to reverse engineer the legacy systems so that they could be evaluated and viewed at a higher level thereby reducing the time spent viewing the COBOL programs. In the next phase of re-engineering X-Analysis played a major role in helping analysts identify the current business rules and provided the impact analysis tools used by them during the file normalisation process. It also enabled them to estimate the effort and time required for the re-engineering phase and to set realistic guidelines for completion. Naturally the project was successful. Doubleday's inventory system has been completely re-engineered, giving improved response times, improved functionality and standardized user interfaces. The direct result of this was to reduce overtime required by staff during nightly batch processing time and to provide greater accuracy in the business data available for further analysis.
