A very large company on a very old interface
ID Logistics is one of the world's leading operators for retail and textile logistics, and after acquiring Logiters one of the largest in Spain and Portugal. It runs more than 5.5 million square metres of warehousing across 320 sites in seventeen countries, with over 22,000 employees, from a head office in Orgon, France.
It has trusted IBM i and Power Systems for more than 25 years, going back to the System/38. The majority of its transactions run there, including a critical logistics application built in-house, and the French production environment serves every other country.
Then lockdowns moved the world's shopping online. ID Logistics' retail and e-commerce clients saw demand spike, and the pressure landed on the infrastructure and on an application still driven through 5250 green screens.
What we did
We moved the critical logistics application from the green screen to a modern web interface, and added multi-language support at the same time. The translation runs through CDVTS, our own tool, which translates the application on the fly — so the same application serves all seventeen countries without seventeen versions of it.
The whole modernisation was completed in under three months, and improved productivity for developers and business users alike.
Then the platform underneath it
ID Logistics also wanted to scale quickly without buying hardware, and without its IT teams carrying high availability and security during a pandemic. With CD-Invest and IBM, the company migrated its business-critical infrastructure and applications to Power Systems Virtual Server — IBM i on a Power S922 in the cloud.
High availability and security became someone else's problem to operate, which freed the teams to support clients at the moment those clients needed it most.
Why we show this one
It is the clearest example of the argument we make on the front page. Nothing about the logistics application's business logic was thrown away. Twenty-five years of it kept running. What changed was the interface in front of it and the machine underneath it — and both changed in under three months, during the worst possible quarter to attempt either.
Source: cdinvest.eu portfolio, ID Logistics. Company figures as published there.