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When one of Australia’s largest retailers revitalised its stores, its product lines and its approach to doing business, long-time infrastructure support partner CSC followed suit, refreshing and upgrading the mainframe environment to support a more agile, focused business.

The Challenge

CSC has supported the customer’s IT infrastructure since 2004, providing operations support services across a large number of stores.

The IBM mainframe supports all the company’s merchandise processes, including stock control, pricing, purchasing and reporting. As the new business strategy began to show benefits, CSC support staff raised the issue of the ageing operating system on the company’s IBM Z-OS mainframe.

Upgrading offered the potential to improve systems supporting stock control and financial processing – not upgrading meant that these benefits would be delayed – an ‘opportunity cost’ of inaction.

The Solution

CSC responded to the company’s business refreshment strategy by revitalising and refocusing its support team, increasing on-site staff presence, introducing an upgraded training program and delivering a stronger approach to account governance.

Shortly afterwards, the company’s management commissioned an upgrade roadmap for the mainframe that ensured that CSC would have greater visibility of the business to maximise benefit and minimise disruption.

The Results

Once management approval for the upgrade had been received, the IBM Z-OS mainframe was upgraded from version 1.7 in 2008 to 1.9 in early 2009, and again from 1.9 to 1.11 in 2010. The latest upgrade took five months to complete and represented a significant investment in planning.

It was completed in early 2011 and prompted the company to praise “the most successful upgrade that CSC has managed to date” and to recognise CSC with an IT Supplier Award in recognition of operational excellence and customer service.
 
Business Benefits

CSC was able to drive mainframe costs down by refreshing the mainframe technology and adapting systems and process solutions to the scale of the business.
The mainframe upgrades also improved the mainframe’s stability, while ongoing manufacturer support and better application performance were benefits that users noticed every day.

“The company can now use mainframe functionality that was previously inaccessible – it’s given them greater flexibility” said CSC’s Account Executive,Frank Arrigo.