Case Study: Yamaha Motors
Yamaha Motors connects CICS to distributed client applications. HostBridge saves development time and integration costs.
The Yamaha Motor Corporation, Ltd., begun in 1955, is the second largest manufacturer of motorcycles in the world. Yamaha Motor Corporation also handles snowmobiles, golf carts, outboard engines, and water vehicles. Yamaha provides remote access to CICS applications for district managers and dealers to place orders, allocate products, and generate reports on sales history, inventory levels, orders processed, etc. Using HostBridge, Yamaha integrated its CICS applications with existing client applications and as a result, expects to save more than $100,000 annually in dial-up expenses.
Challenges
Yamaha was spending thousands of dollars monthly on dialup lines for its district managers to have access to corporate data through SIMPC. They used a toll-free number dialup network with banks of modems to access the mainframe and traditional screen-scraping techniques to interact with CICS applications. District managers had complained that the system sometimes lost their uploaded orders. Eliminating the SIMPC system would eliminate dialup costs (significantly cutting operating costs for the network), increase District Manager and Dealer satisfaction, and reduce the burden on technical support staff that had to track down potentially lost orders.
Yamaha wanted to preserve the client interface that district managers use to access to the online order allocation system. Yamaha needed a flexible solution that could feed information to the existing user interface. Yamaha also needed to continue providing the District Managers with the ability to generate, view, and download reports from CICS.
Technical Requirements
Previous experiences with screen scraping led Yamaha to conclude that it didn’t want to base an integration on it. Recent application reengineering efforts made them receptive to keeping the legacy applications they once thought they would rewrite or port. This limited the range of possible integration solutions.
Yamaha’s Java developers were not familiar with the business logic locked away in the legacy applications; they just wanted a clean way to get at the data. Yamaha needed to separate the business logic within the CICS applications from the presentation logic, and they needed a boundary between the mainframe and middle-tier.
Solution
Yamaha had rewritten a few of their CICS SIMPC-dependent applications to COMMAREA programs so they could receive requests for reports from Java server applications and simply return the requested report data. After several months of rewriting and debugging these legacy applications, Earl Haigh, an outside consultant, suggested they use HostBridge to XML-enable the remaining SIMPC-dependent applications. “We had HostBridge up and running in day one,” said Haigh. “Once the Java guys saw the XML output from HostBridge, they knew immediately what to do with it. It was easy for them to integrate the data into the client applications used by the District Managers.” HostBridge separated the business logic and presentation logic and XML provided the boundary to insulate the client application from the mainframe.
HostBridge now integrates Yamaha’s CICS order allocation applications with the existing client applications. District Managers download allocated inventory quantities and upload orders using the same client application they were already familiar with. Haigh added a new process that emails details of the order to the District Managers to assure them the order was correctly received.
Figure 1. Yamaha Dealer Support Network architecture
Benefits
HostBridge has made it possible for Yamaha to continue to benefit from the investments in proven technologies while building new infrastructures based on XML and Java. HostBridge allowed Yamaha to keep existing CICS applications and client applications. By separating the business logic and presentation logic using XML, HostBridge saved months of development time versus reengineering CICS and client applications to use Java clients and the CICS JavaGateway. In the future, HostBridge will extend the ROI of Yamaha’s legacy systems further by allowing other groups of users to access browser-based reports and allowing Yamaha’s Supply Chain Management system to interact with the existing CICS applications.
Using HostBridge to replace the previous host access solution used by District Managers, Yamaha expects to save more than $100,000 annually in dial-up expenses. The old solution used CompuServe accounts and X.25 connections to allow remote users to connect to SIMPC and access Yamaha’s CICS applications. The company was able to move away from their existing solution without having to retrain employees to use a new interface. As part of a larger supply chain management (SCM) project, Yamaha plans to use HostBridge to provide back-end connectivity between its online order entry system and WebSphere MQ.
