Nissan Europe: Driving Efficiency Even Faster

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 opportunities to improve quality, enhance 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 would be the foundation for continued success. So Nissan Europe embarked on a new journey to optimize, modernize, and transform, with a mainframe roadmap designed to provide 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 on automation, efficient robotics, and a digital supply chain thanks to Adabas & Natural. And this is directly improving our bottom line.”

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

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 most runtime processes from IBM® mainframe CPUs to non-throttled, dedicated zIIP processors, Natural saw a boost in throughput.

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 sets the rules, clients subscribe, and Adabas Event Replicator distributes data whenever and 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 lack the skills, and development within a 3270 paradigm has limitations that will never allow progress. Eclipse is the future, and NaturalONE is the bridge to getting there.

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 remain competitive in a new, smarter, leaner 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. In an industry as competitive as automotive manufacturing, such flexibility is the key to success.

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