“We did it all in a weekend, which would have been impossible without ARCTOOLS”*
DBG Canada is a privately owned, multi-national manufacturer supplying the truck, auto, military and consumer goods industries. They have manufacturing facilities in Canada and Mexico, employing over 700 workers. They have been on JD Edwards since 1998 and had never purged. They were running 8.10 on SQL Server and in the process of upgrading to 9.1.
DBG had some fairly large tables – over 70 million in the F0911, for example, and some long running processes – 4 hours for Canada’s MRP, 8 hours for Mexico’s MRP, and a “daily backup” that ran for more than 24 hours.
Their upgrade included the move from 8.10 to 9.1, new hardware, virtualization and a server farm, among other items. The timeline started with new hardware in March 2013, ending with the cutover to the new systems in November.
Around July, it became clear that the data conversion would not be possible in the planned time frame – a weekend. It would instead require more time, thus forcing plants to be idled, including the 700 employees at those plants. DBG realized that purge and archive could be the answer.
The decision to implement ARCTOOLS was made in August. The software was implemented “straight out of the box”, in parallel with the ongoing upgrade project. As Julian Wainewright from DBG characterized it, they decided to just “throw ARCTOOLS at it”. They ran multiple purge modules, following the recommended scripts.
The bottom line is that ARCTOOLS ran right out of the box and successfully purged multiple years of data. The various analyses each ran in minutes, and the purge/archive throughputs were clocked at millions of rows an hour- as high as 40 million rows an hour. The ARCTOOLS implementation was a success, and the subsequent upgrade happened on time and without additional downtime for the plants.
In addition to avoiding the upgrade crisis, DBG realized many other substantial benefits due to using ARCTOOLS as part of their upgrade strategy: their previous MRP run times dropped from 4 and 8 hours to about an hour each; their “daily” backup time dropped from more than a day to just a couple hours; their disaster recovery scenarios improved substantially due to faster backups and restores; there were noticeable overall improvements in run times and response times, and; these benefits propagated to all the many test environments that were copies of production.
But archiving as part of an upgrade should not be limited to only those shops that have issues with data conversion run times. Any shop working on an upgrade can get substantial benefits from archiving. As Julian put it:
“When you’re doing an upgrade project and you unveil something new to people, before they get to ‘hey this is new, this is cool’, they are going to try what they know already. If it’s slower than what they had before, then in the first couple minutes it will kill your project. They haven’t even gotten to the ‘whiz-bang’ stuff. If they try the new system and it’s not faster it can really kill adoption.”
So, archiving makes perfect sense for any JD Edwards upgrade project.
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* Quote from Julian Wainewright, DBG Canada