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| Case Study |
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Patni's technology expertise strengthens a global client's mainframe strategy
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A large global client earns significant year on year cost reduction, ease of manageability and organizational effectiveness with Patni's expertise in mainframe technology, and its Six Sigma and offshore approach.
The Client
A large consumer products company with major manufacturing facilities in the US and Europe, and operating in 200 countries.
The Challenge
The client's accounts payable application served around 45 of its various businesses globally. The client was faced with a multitude of problems resulting from mounting costs on the system that was overly 'fat' and needed a major overhaul. It therefore required to focus on developing strategies towards stabilization of mainframe production batch cycle, test system cost reduction, reduced backlog of change requests, and memory usage cost reduction.
On the system front:
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The daily production run was showing major signs of weakness by way of an average of 15 aborts per cycle. |
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There was a backlog of more than 200 change requests piled up for system analysis, and deliveries not been resolved by the earlier vendor. |
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The test system used to take a minimum of 8 hours for successful completion of a single run. |
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On the memory usage front, the DASD cost was to be reduced by about 33%. |
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The mainframe system has many interfaces and is based on a range of technologies. The inputs come in the form of electronic data interchange (EDI), Oracle format transmission layouts resulting in four major types and over 100 different layouts from various clients. |
The Solution
Patni took over the project and in its first move to cut project costs set up a team of 17 consultants in place of 29 consultants being used by the previous vendor to manage the application. The team was trained on Six Sigma methodologies and corporate-wide service levels adopted for the project.
Highlights
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Stablizing the batch production environment
Patni's Production Support team worked together on a giant drive to eliminate aborts and improve confidence in the system. Every defect that had a repeating track record was analyzed and solved. Increased emphasis was placed on processes by adopting Six Sigma methodologies for an optimized and permanent solution to errors in the system.
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Clearing the backlog of CRs
CR delivery was speeded to minimize the backlog. Frequent status review and reporting ensured smooth operation of the CR flow.
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Reducing the DASD storage cost
A process was engineered and put in place that brought down the DASD storage cost significantly.
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Reviewing the test system to reduce run-time
The system was studied and an automated 'leaner & cheaper' one was designed. The simplified test system reduced the overall run-time by half.
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Ensuring process improvement and automation
Process improvement focus lead to a large extent of automation in system applications, resulting in huge savings of effort and costs. A number of business critical projects were delivered 'on time' and 'first time right'.
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Increasing Six Sigma projects
A complete analysis of the system and its related processes was done to explore opportunities of reducing costs in various areas of the mainframe application. This triggered a number of Six Sigma green belt projects with quality rigor.
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Family of client applications supported with an 84% offshore leverage |
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24x7 Mainframe production support executed 100% from offshore |
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Enhancements spawned as fixed price project executed 100% from offshore |
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Task management, project tracking through web-based tool |
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Website for knowledge management |
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Standard operating procedures manual |
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The Technology
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Mainframe: Mainframe OS 390, VSAM, JCL, Easytrieve, COBOL |
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Client Server: VB, PB, SQL Server 2000, XML, XSL, EDI |
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Web Technologies: ASP, .NET technologies |
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Business Objects |
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The Benefits
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Significant cost reduction, system up-time and recovery, system stabilization and optimization, stringent service levels |
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Resultant net savings of $584,000 in mainframe operational cost per year |
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DASD storage cost savings worth $494,000 per year |
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Exchange of best practices, and deep mutual confidence resulting in the creation of a highly competent and optimized work force.
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