Littlewoods Modernizes Warehouse Mapping System with Transoft and PTC Solutions in a Deal Worth £160,000

Littlewoods transforms warehouse-mapping system in move away from high maintenance proprietary system

November 26, 2001 - Leading international provider of application transformation, integration and assembly products and services, Transoft, has partnered with PTC Solutions Ltd to reduce on-going maintenance and support costs at major retailer Littlewoods. This has been achieved by utilizing Transoft's Application Transformation suite to migrate Littlewoods' warehouse stock mapping system from a proprietary Bull platform to a Sun Solaris machine.

For eighteen years, Littlewoods had been using a custom-written COBOL '74 system running under GCOS on a Bull machine to assign stock to bin locations in its major warehouse supporting the Home Shopping business. Although the application was still meeting business requirements, the ongoing hardware maintenance costs had become prohibitively expensive. With the help of Transoft and partner PTC, this established system has been migrated and restructured onto a Solaris platform using Transoft's Application Transformation suite. During this process, the data access layer of the application was re-engineered to utilize an Oracle database in place of the proprietary Bull IDSII database. The transfer of the application from the Bull platform enabled Littlewoods to discontinue their use of the Bull machine, and eliminate its maintenance costs.

The Littlewoods business is the first project jointly undertaken by new partners PTC and Transoft. Paul Holland, chief executive officer at Transoft explained, "Part of Littlewoods' requirements fell outside of our core skills, so it made sense to find a partner to complement our existing expertise." He continued, "The trend today is away from simple application migrations to more complex transformations like this one, and our worldwide total for both is close to 150 projects."

About PTC:
Founded in 1983 as Phoenix Training & Consultancy (UK) Ltd, PTC has grown to become a leading supplier of software and services to computer users across the world. Initially, PTC specialised in providing services only for Bull large and medium system users, but today PTC has diversified into a solutions based company, which is independent of the hardware platform. PTC acts as the distributor for a range of products from leading European and American software houses.

PTC Solutions is the marketing division of PTC (UK) for all products and services and sells an integrated range of scalable cross-platform Enterprise Management and Performance Monitoring Software solutions. The company can provide complete business solutions from audit and design through to implementation and training.

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