* The company names and the contents of the case studies are given as of the time of the interview.

A Japanese food wholesaler, Kokubu & Co., Ltd., established in 1712, wishes to use the latest IT to consolidate its supply chain to optimize it throughout its network of suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers. This supply chain consolidation (SCC) was begun in the year 2000, with the downsizing of Kokubu's IT systems. In 2004, after migrating the logistic system and the information system, the company began the migration of mission-critical systems from the mainframe to UNIX servers. To ensure stable migration, Kokubu is dividing it into two phases. Phase 1 is the straight conversion of the current system. Phase 2 brings the addition of new methods and functions.

The systems considered mission-critical are those used in entering data from the logistic system and the inventory system, creating summary data, Account Receivable, Account Payable, General Ledger, invoicing, etc. Most of these processes are handled by batch processing. Kokubu had been using A-AUTO for mainframe to schedule 7,000 networks of 12,000 jobs. In phase 1, they had to move these 12,000 jobs to the UNIX environment and then manage their scheduling and execution. For safe migration, and to reduce its cost and duration, they selected A-AUTO for UNIX as the job scheduler for this UNIX environment. BSP provided a master conversion utility that converts A-AUTO for mainframe master files to A-AUTO for UNIX master files.

Kokubu started the conversion to A-AUTO in November 2004. For the first two months, the company implemented the date generation function in the UNIX environment, because A-AUTO for UNIX does not have a function compatible with the A-AUTO function for parameter management. Then they converted Network Master and Data Wait Master by use of BSP's conversion utility. They were able to convert 90% of the information in the A-AUTO database without manual change. In June 2005, A-AUTO for UNIX began to be used for parallel tests. In September 2005, phase 1 went to production.

For higher availability, the UNIX server is partitioned into 2 LPARs and implements IBM's cluster tool, HACMP. When the production A-AUTO encounters trouble, the backup A-AUTO takes control and continues the execution of the application systems.

In phase 1 the most important goal was to reduce the cost and duration of the conversion to the minimum. Kokubu reached this goal by choosing A-AUTO for UNIX. Another benefit of selecting A-AUTO for UNIX was related to human resources. The operations team had to learn many new things when migrating from mainframe to UNIX. They avoided having to learn a new scheduling system, because basically A-AUTO for UNIX can be managed in the same way as A-AUTO for mainframe.

After the successful completion of phase 1, the company has moved to phase 2. In phase 2 the main goals in downsizing were to improve business values and to reduce TCO. Both of these goals were reached. In phase 2, many batch jobs are scheduled to be eliminated. For the present, however, some batch jobs continue to run; and even after phase 2 is completed, A-AUTO for UNIX will continue to support the company by optimizing the scheduling of batch jobs.