The Situation:'
Dachser is one of the leading logistic service providers in Europe and offers its customers solutions for integrated commodity and information management. As one of the few family enterprises in the sector, Dachser has been able to maintain a balance between a sense of tradition, cosmopolitanism and innovation from which it bundles optimal service packages for the transportation, storage, dispatching, packaging and dead-on delivery of goods at optimal costs and in a manner ideally suited to the product at hand.  The company’s head office is located in Kempten in Allgaeu and with its 17,100 employees around the globe, Dachser turned over 3.5 billion euros in 2007.

The company associates its claim “Intelligent Logistics” with the combination of its longstanding experience in state-of-the-art information technologies and its partner-like teamwork with employees, collaborators and customers across national and cultural borders. With this competency, Dachser has set standards for the logistics sector. In doing so, a homogenous, worldwide network of branch offices and partnerships links the core market in Europe to all corners of the world — quickly and flexibly.

For the optimal support of business processes,self-developed Java, RPG and Cobol applications are run on Dachser’s strategic hardware platform, IBM System i.  Roughly 11,000 users around the world work with these applications on a daily basis.

• The newly acquired French logistics corporation Graveleu had to be switched over Dachser’s own IT apps as quickly as possible. At the same time, only graphical user interfaces were to be implemented so that the transition would be as smooth as possible for the French users.
• The strategy for future software development was pegged as Java, based on a J2EE framework. All new applications were therefore developed directly in the J2EE technology. Because rewriting RPG and Cobol apps in Java is inefficient from a cost perspective, a new technology had to be found with which the existing 5250 green screen applications could be integrated as seamlessly as possible and with a minimum amount of effort.

In an initial phase, exemplary applications were created for the new interface standard. These were then discussed with the individual departments before they were implemented by a project team made up of Dachser and PKS employees. Because Dachser employs various development techniques in the area of Cobol and RPG, these interface standards also had be standardized.  In addition, the server and client programs were integrated in Dachser’s infrastructure (production and backup).

The project was carried out within the space of nine months. At three French branch offices, the graphical application now runs productively; another five German branches are currently in test operations (as of Q4/2007) and will go into productive operation in the near future. For Dachser’s IT management team, it is vital that employees’ feedback on usability and functionality is continually integrated in the application so that the users’ workflow can be further optimized. At regularly held meetings with PKS, suggestions and needs are therefore discussed on an ongoing basis.

The Benefits:

• Fusion of RPG and Java is possible without any disruption for the user
• Fastest possible integration of new technologies
• Step-by-step modernization—even for new applications that are to be developed in Java in the future
• Integration in new graphical applications is possible
• Existing 5250 apps can be extended with additional functionalities for the graphical area