Paltac Corporation moves off mainframe to Caché
 |
Key Benefits
- High Performance
- Scalability
- Reliability
In Japan, where retail space is at a premium, convenience store owners replenish their inventory in a manner that's akin to "just in time" delivery. Retailers restock their shelves on a daily basis, and it is normal for them to place an order for items in lots of only one or two pieces. This process places enormous pressure on a distribution system to perform efficiently.
Paltac Corporation, a $2.6 billion (US) corporation, felt this pressure, and so, merged with Shinwa Corporation, one of Japan's premier distributors of commodity merchandise. Paltac was attracted to Shinwa - voted the number one IT company in the Japanese distribution industry - primarily because of Shinwa's Advanced Management System (AMS), a retail distribution application based on InterSystems' Caché.
"Caché's flexible data structures lets us cope easily and quickly with changes within our business environment."
- Ryosaku Michibata
Project
Manager
Now, Paltac is off its mainframe, and Shinwa's system gives Paltac the high performance it needs to access data from its 10 GB database, flexibility to accommodate the wide array of items it carries in its inventory, and reliability to attain 99.999 percent system availability.
AMS runs on two NEC Express 5800/160R Pro 2 System NT Clusters. The two Pentium processors, shadowed for redundancy, support 60 Pentium clients running InterSystems' web technology to give its employees access to the database over the Internet.
But more importantly, Paltac gets instantaneous access to data, and flexibility to change the database to reflect the unique characteristics of each of Paltac's over 5,000 customers. These customers place up a total of up to 10,000 orders per day for the more than 10,000 items listed in the database.
"Because our developers were primarily mainframe COBOL programmers, we needed a language they could learn easily," said Ryosaku Michibata, project manager and information systems system division manager at Paltac. "The Caché scripting language allowed our staff to move forward.
"Our business's success is dependent upon our ability to respond to our customers' wishes. Caché's flexible data structures lets us cope easily and quickly with changes within our business environment."