Case Study : Kuehne & Nagel    

Micro Focus at Kuehne & Nagel

With headquarters in Switzerland, Kuehne & Nagel is one of the leading logistics companies worldwide having over 17,000 employees in 600 offices. Its strength lies in the sea and airfreight businesses, with a clear focus on contract logistics and the provision of leading-edge supply chain management services.

IT infrastructure 

Kuehne & Nagel runs a number of mission-critical applications to drive its core business processes: air, land and sea freight systems, warehouse management applications and finance and accounting systems. The company runs EDI on a worldwide basis and uses information brokerage systems as well as global messaging to communicate between branches. In addition, a customer portal is deployed for freight tracking and tracing, order management, material management, container management, E-Quote and E-Booking, all running on IBM’s iSeries platforms using DB2 databases and written in RPG and RPG/ILE. Together these applications comprise several million lines of code.

The challenge

The company’s goal of excellence in customer service depends on being able to provide customers with a well integrated and resilient global supply chain. Customers must be confident that they have access to accurate, real-time data and business processes on a 24/7 basis. To deliver this confidence, Kuehne & Nagel needed a precise picture of its application assets and had to identify which code and data are processed, know exactly where they come from and understand the logical relationships between them.

The solution

Within Kuehne & Nagel, the Micro Focus Application Portfolio Management (APM) solution allows automated tracking and control of application changes. Today, the company develops applications faster. Data quality was also an issue because data sharing between Kuehne & Nagel and its customers is critical for effective supply chain management. Micro Focus APM identifies data changes automatically helping to avoid inaccurate data processing and inadequate customer service.

The initial pilot project was implemented within days and the proof of concept project took less than a month to complete. The software was deployed in the company’s New York and Hong Kong branches as a key element of the company’s corporate software development and quality improvement strategy. ROI was achieved in less than 12 months.

"The [Micro Focus APM]suite provides full control over all our application assets, allowing us to quickly and optimally react to changing business requirements and easily undertake potential systems development and application integration projects without affecting customer service."

Thomas Engel, CIO, Kuehne & Nagel