Nissan Europe: Driving Efficiency Even Faster

When we decided to update our mainframe roadmap we turned to our partners at Software AG, with whom we have worked for more than 30 years. Adabas & Natural have offered us ever-improving efficiencies in terms of IT overhead and operational functionality.

Simon Johnson, Mainframe Middleware Manager, Alliance IT, Nissan Europe

Super continuity, zero downtime

Nissan Europe has relied on Software AG’s Adabas & Natural for database management and application development since it opened its flagship plant in the U.K. in the 1980s. With continuous improvements in efficiency and speed, the partnership has helped Nissan Europe develop an entire suite of mission-critical applications that run on Adabas & Natural, touching everything from manufacturing, to purchasing, to sales and marketing. With zero software failures in the past 30 years, Nissan Europe returned to Software AG for the next step in the evolution of its Adabas & Natural systems: committing to a new efficiency-boosting, feature-enhancing, cost-reducing project.

It was a smart move. Connected supply chains, digital manufacturing and dramatic improvements in robotics and machine learning have disrupted the automotive manufacturing market—and created openings to increase quality, improve agility and cut costs. The key for Nissan Europe was that the project would build on a long legacy of Adabas & Natural productivity, adding modern performance and gearing up for an unpredictable future. A previous program was so successful—netting a 100 percent performance increase by eliminating database downtime—that it made perfect sense for Nissan Europe to once again choose Software AG as its preferred partner.

Digitalization was knocking at the door and bringing Nissan Europe’s Adabas & Natural applications up to speed was going to be the foundation for continued success. So Nissan Europe embarked on a new journey to optimize, modernize and transform, with a mainframe roadmap designed for maximum strategic flexibility for the decades ahead.

“For decades we’ve tuned this system, and for decades Software AG has come through with enhancements that have exceeded our expectations. Now, we are implementing changes based around automation, efficient robotics, and a digital supply chain thanks to Adabas & Natural. And this is directly improving our bottom line” says Simon Johnson, Mainframe Middleware Manager, Alliance IT, Nissan Europe.

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Un-throttled performance 

Nissan Europe is implementing a series of products aimed at increasing automation, improving manufacturing quality, and reducing delays and manufacturing costs. This is allowing Nissan Europe to get the absolute most out of its current Adabas & Natural architecture, while keeping an eye to the future.

“Right from the very start of our discussions, it was clear that Software AG had a strong long-term strategy for Adabas & Natural that was going to work exactly to our advantage,” says Simon Johnson, Mainframe Middleware Manager, Alliance IT, Nissan Europe. “This sort of continuity, coupled with regular improvements, is exactly why we chose such a partner in the first place.”

Natural for zIIP™ was a clear case for deployment because it required no changes to existing Natural applications. By offloading the majority of runtime processes from IBM® mainframe CPUs to non-throttled, dedicated zIIP processors, Natural saw a throughput boost.

Adabas Cluster Services will ensure those improvements aren’t lost to downtime. After all, if the software goes down, Nissan Europe isn’t making cars. Based on IBM’s Parallel Sysplex® architecture, Adabas Cluster Services lets a multi-CPU environment appear as a single, superpowerful computer. The benefit is that if one of the coupled systems goes down, the others in the cluster dynamically handle the load. Such architecture offers a bonus speed-up through parallelization.

“Nissan Europe is always looking for an edge on its competition, especially that coming from the East,” says Ian Porter, IT Planning Section Manager, Nissan Europe. “Cluster Services does that by letting us run 24/7 if we want, with the potential to have three eight-hour shifts when it’s profitable to do so.”

Next up is Adabas Event Replicator. Unlike ETL systems that run extracts daily or weekly—producing already out-of-date data by definition— Adabas Event Replicator will automate the process in real time, pushing data across Nissan Europe’s networks. Nissan Europe set up the rules, clients subscribe and Adabas Event Replicator distributes data whenever it needs to go, wherever it needs to go, without human intervention.

Finally, NaturalONE will fully modernize Nissan Europe’s development tools, moving from a 3270 green-screen system to the modern Eclipse™ environment that new graduates are already familiar with. The old way has worked well for decades, but new trainees don’t have the skills— and development in a 3270 paradigm has limitations that will never progress. Eclipse is the future, and NaturalONE is the bridge to getting there.

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Tuned for acceleration

With an updated strategy being executed, Nissan Europe has positioned itself for maximum performance today—and seamless flexibility for the future. The company’s mainframe strategy has evolved to stay competitive in a newly smart and lean manufacturing environment. Since the update brings the system in-line with modern interoperability standards and languages, future compatibility is in Nissan Europe’s pocket.

No matter what the next 30 years bring, Nissan Europe will be able to adapt. An in an industry as competitive as automotive manufacturing such flexibility is the key to success.