Coop Danmark A/S Successfully Migrates from BMC Control-D to Beta DocX

Coop Danmark A/S is Denmark‘s leading consumer goods retailer. Coop operates the retail chains Kvickly, SuperBrugsen, Dagli’Brugsen, 365discount and Coop.dk Shopping. Coop Danmark and the subsidiaries have an annual turnover of approx. DKK 42 billion, and in total 40,000 employees. Coop has no stockholders since it is a cooperative, owned by 1.9 million members.

The Control-D installation proved to include several bugs. This made it a lot harder to access the data and complete the migration. It called for careful analysis of the bugs, several workarounds, and adaptions of the migration routines. At the same time, the project could not be allowed to stall since the sunset of the mainframe was dependent on the migration and delays would incur large costs for Coop.

Coop had been planning a mainframe exit for some time, investing in SAP S/4 HANA as its new main platform. However, the mainframe could not be shut down due to important financial records kept in Control-D, including for example invoices from suppliers. Coop was obliged by law to retain this archive data for another 10 years. The conclusion: a migration to an open systems product was needed to enable the mainframe exit.

The new system would need to meet certain requirements. Firstly, the data in Control-D was mainframe specific, meaning lists and reports in EBCDIC format stored in CDAM files. The new system would need to support this since it was not allowed to modify or change the data. Secondly, the data was indexed and searchable in Control-D by several criteria, for example Store ID, departments within the stores etc. The users in the accounting department of Coop would need to be able to find what they were looking for in the new system as well. Thirdly, the migration design would need to include a concept for delta migration since Control-D was still a live system. Fourthly, due to terabytes of data there was a strong need for automating the migration.

Thanks to a great cooperation and dedication both from the teams at Coop and the Beta Systems services team the result was a success. The data could be saved and migrated in time before the mainframe was due to shut down. A key success factor was that Beta Systems had prior experience in migrating from Control-D and could offer readily developed migration tooling specifically designed for Control-D. The routines could also be adapted in a flexible way during the project to counter the specific challenges. The users were also satisfied with the new product: Beta DocX. It provides an intuitive, easy-to-use, and modern HTML5 web UI that can easily be configured and personalized for individual users. The most important aspect: the search in Beta DocX is a lot faster than in Control-D. Faster response times makes it more comfortable to work with the product