Supporting a Clean Transition
Textile Care Services: an IBM i RPG development success story
Technologies
About Textile Care Services
One of four major brands of parent company Healthcare Linen Services Group (HLSG), Textile Care is based in Minneapolis, MN and provides high-quality textile rental services to both the healthcare and hospitality industries – including commercial laundering and delivery of linen and apparel items to hospitals, nursing homes, clinics and hotels.
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The Goals
- Successfully move the IBM i to the hosting provider with minimal disruption
- Retire the existing IBM i
- Provide development services that the company needed moving forward
Key Results
Transition to a hosted IBM i solution
Implemented standard-based configurations
Enhanced data security
Ongoing technical support
Project Highlights
The Challenge
The immediate issue was that Textile Care’s IT Director was planning to retire. In addition, the company’s outsourced developer was also retiring. The company also wanted to take their infrastructure and move it offsite to a data center. They had an IBM i / iSeries sitting in a room in one of their plants which increased the risk of an interruption to the business should physical damage to the hardware occur or some other event result in loss of access to their data.
To address these issues, the company wanted to move their IBM i / AS400 to a hosted environment, keeping their computer environment safe and secure and providing the necessary redundancy to ensure business continuity. And due to the impending loss of on-site support expertise, Textile Care was in need of knowledgeable support for the hardware and software.
The Solution
Enter Kevin Watt, Senior Consultant on the Briteskies IBM i team – a seasoned developer with extensive experience moving an IBM i to a hosted provider. As Briteskies Project Manager for Textile Care Kevin’s goals were to:
- Move the IBM i / AS400 to a hosted environment with minimal disruptions to the business
- Retire the existing IBM i
- Provide development services that the company needed moving forward due to retirements
While Briteskies was initially contracted to assist with the move to the hosting provider, the company appreciated the value of entering into a monthly support agreement to provide ongoing development services on an as-needed basis – whether it was a simple tech support call, an EDI data error or integration backlogs, or enhancements to the system.
The Result
Not only has Textile Care been able to effectively transition to a hosted IBM i, but with the support of Briteskies Managed Services, the company has been able to move toward a standards-based configuration and monitoring. This level of support has allowed Textile Care to proactively resolve issues that previously had the potential to turn into real problems. It’s a solution that has helped the company improve operational efficiencies, decrease the threat of downtime, and reduce costs.
