Medium-sized Success Enterprises Connecting people to data at Wilhelm Karmann GmbH Back in 1901, Wilhelm Karmann took over a coachwork company that produced horse-drawn vehicles. A year later, he began making special body shells for automobiles. Now with approximately 6000 employees, Wilhelm Karmann GmbH is an independent full-service vehicle supplier to the automotive industry, offering a wide range of services that vary from complete vehicle development and manufacturing engineering to niche vehicle assembly. A key factor in meeting the company’s business goals is how its two most value assets – people and data – are being connected. Producing automotive legends Accessing CICS data via web browsers Wilhelm Karmann GmbH is a partner to As with enterprises everywhere, the rising the automotive industry in Europe and use of PCs at Karmann brought require- North and South America. With its unique ments for graphical user interfaces for host portfolio of competencies and capabili- data and for data downloads to PCs. The IT ties, Karmann is able to complement the team has met these requirements by in-house facilities of its customers. exploiting NetPage, part of CPG Level 5. Projects handled by Karmann for automo- A heterogeneous world NetPage is an HTML generator for web bile manufacturers include the: applications that can exploit all of the stan- ❑ Design, development, tooling, produc- Like all producers in the motor industry, dard functions supported by browsers tion planning and manufacture of com- Karmann GmbH is dependent on a com- (frames, radio buttons, and so on). plete vehicles of all types. plex IT environment. A number of operat- ing systems are responsible for different Access to host data uses a three-tier ❑ Design and engineering of modules, applications. For example, AIX supports setup. With NetPage, HTML pages are components and tools. applications like CATIA and relational built on Microsoft Windows and made databases; Windows NT is used on dis- available via an NT web server. When a Karmann is best known for its success tributed PCs; and VM and VSE run criti- browser calls a page, the web server uses with convertibles, but its expertise goes cal mainframe applications. Currently, APPC (Advanced Program-to-Program beyond open-top vehicles. The company Karmann’s mainframe is an IBM Communication) to connect to CICS at has developed and manufactured many 9672-R45 “super server” with VM/ESA the S/390 host. well-known car projects, amounting to over 2.3 and VSE/ESA 2.3 installed. 3 million automobiles. The VW Karmann At the host, data is collected, and a Ghia Coupe and Convertible, BMW Since no third-party software exists CICS program controls what is returned Coupes, the VW Porsche 914, the VW Sci- which meets all of its needs, Karmann’s to the browser and in which format. Data rocco, the VW Corrado and all Ford Escort IT team has developed a number of appli- can be shown, for example, as plain text Convertibles and VW Beetle Convertibles cations. One of these is the company’s or an HTML table. The browser also can were projects handled by Karmann. sophisticated production planning system, be instructed to launch an office applica- which covers supply chain aspects such as tion and put the data in a spreadsheet or The current Karmann customer list contracts, purchasing, and parts logistics. word processing document. includes Audi (Convertible), Daimler- This system makes use of CICS and Chrysler (Mercedes-Benz CLK Convert- VSAM data on the IBM 9672. Its pro- Two sample browser screens are on the ible, SLK body-in-white module), Jaguar gramming language is Communication next page. In the one on the left, users (XK8 Convertible), Renault (Mégane Program Generator (CPG), developed by define the range of the data they want to see Convertible), and Volkswagen (Golf Con- Lattwein GmbH of Düren, Germany. and its format. The screen on the right vertible). shows host VSAM data that has been ana- lyzed. Graphics used in such screens are stored on the web server. Convertibles Made by Karmann 30 BULLETIN 28, August 2000 As Walter Manemann, IT Project Manager at Karmann comments, “Although it sounds a little crazy, creat- ing pages with NetPage and using CPG Level 5 is so easy that it’s actually fun to do the programming! And not being forced to change our databases in order to provide new views of their data helped us keep our development costs within our budget.” Finally, Karmann did not have to abandon its previous IT investments in order to provide this enhanced support. Sample Browser Screens Instead, the company chose to build upon those investments, making them an even more valuable asset in the pursuit of its Linking CICS to relational databases Benefits for all business goals. The next step in connecting Karmann’s These recent actions at Karmann have been employees to its business data was to link beneficial for everyone involved. For PC CICS on the S/390 host with relational users, host-based data is much more acces- databases on other servers. Specifically, this sible, and it’s easier to “mine” valuable meant Oracle running on an RS/6000 SP2 information from it. Thus they can do their with AIX. For this, the IT team again work more efficiently, more effectively. exploited functions from CPG and a multi-tier configuration. Karmann’s IT team also has benefited. ❑ In CPG programs on the host, applica- For example: tion developers can use commands like ❑ Browser functionality means that appli- READ, WRITE, UPDATE, or DELETE cation developers don’t have to worry to access other database systems such as about every detail of data presentation. Oracle. These commands are stored in a Functions like scrolling a displayed data set and filled with variables during page, character font size, or going back runtime. to a previous page are standard with browsers. ❑ An NT server between the S/390 host ❑ and the RS/6000 connects with the host Writing programs that download data Additional information via APPC (Advanced Program-to-Pro- via a browser is much easier than gram Communication). On the other before, because fewer interfaces are For information about Wilhelm Karmann side, it uses ODBC (Open Database involved. In general, programmers only GmbH, visit: Connectivity) to interact with the Ora- have to deal with copying data and then www.karmann.com cle database. making a link in an HTML page. ❑ Direct exchange of data between CICS Lattwein GmbH has its home page (in This type of configuration makes it and PCs is possible using another tool German and English) at: possible to connect to any database sys- available with CPG Level 5. An addi- www.lattwein.de tem that has an ODBC interface. To make tional server for this is not required. things simpler, however, Karmann and The home pages for VSE/ESA and Lattwein currently are working on a CICS are: project to connect CICS and Oracle ❑ ibm.com/s390/vse directly and thus make the NT server ❑ unnecessary. ibm.com/software/ts/cics Walter Manemann IT Project Manager Wilhelm Karmann GmbH [email protected] Hans Joachim Ebert S/390 Technical Support VM/VSE IBM Munich [email protected] BULLETIN 28, August 2000 31.