DTM for iSeries Customer: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
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How Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Easily Resolved Their OV/400 Migration Project
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is a leading North American financial institution with branches based in various countries. CIBC has more than $287.50 billion in assets, with over eight million retail banking customers and approximately 8,000 corporate and investment banking customers.
When IBM announced the end of life of Office Vision/400, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce had a WAF/Content Manager application that was using OV/400 extensively to merge and print customer letters interactively and in batch. This was a major application investment for their operations and both time and budget constraints ruled out new software and/or hardware as a replacement.
Looking for an OV/400 replacement
CIBC was in search of a suitable solution to migrate away from OV/400, when they learned about Inventive Designers’ DTM for iSeries software via IBM and IBM’s Redbook. They considered several software packages offering migration solutions, but soon realized that the technology from Inventive Designers was the most complete and advanced offering.
DTM for iSeries was selected, because it replaces all the important OV/400 document and data/text merge functions. Moreover, it would enable CIBC to continue using its existing applications with minimal modifications and avoid expensive, time-consuming rewrites and re-engineering of their applications.
Testing DTM for iSeries
In September 2001, while testing DTM for iSeries, CIBC discovered it was very user friendly. The DTM 5250 User Interface functioned very much like the old OV/400 5250 (green screen) editor and consequently working with the new product demanded minimal training efforts from their users. They were also impressed with the DTM MS Word User Interface, which meant that they could now incorporate an evolving technology the bank was standardizing on.
Their old OV/400 documents could be upgraded to the DTM format on-the-fly and in batch, which came in handy, as they were facing the conversion of hundreds of documents. And since the DTM technology is iSeries native, they would retain their application and hardware investment dollars.
Team work
The CIBC WAF/Content Manager is a workflow and image-based application. At that time DTM for iSeries had never been used in conjunction with WAF-based customized applications and a few underlying differences were found in the way documents were being processed by OV/400 and by DTM for iSeries.
By working closely together with Inventive Designers’ technical team, the varying issues were resolved in a short period of time and after some application modifications at the customer’s site, ID’s software was implemented into production. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, located in Toronto, became the first customer to use DTM for iSeries successfully with the WAF/Content Manager application. Since then several new customers that also rely on WAF have benefited from this great cooperation between customer and vendor.
"I must say that all members of Inventive Designers’ DTM staff are very knowledgeable and supportive with a great sense of responsibility and superb customer care." Said Nadeem Faizi, CIBC's Senior Systems Analyst.
Migration kick-off
After having purchased DTM for iSeries in November 2001, the real work began. The migration project consisted of several different steps.
- Printing all the documents in their current environment using OV/400.
- Converting the documents into the XML based architecture used by DTM for iSeries through a batch conversion process.
- Printing all converted documents using DTM for iSeries.
- Comparing the documents printed with OV/400 and DTM for iSeries to validate they are identical.
- Making a few amendments in the application using native DTM commands to guarantee perfect functionality of ID’s software in CIBC’s unique environment.
Going live
In June 2002 Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce installed the software on their brand-new iSeries with OS/400 V5R1 and went in production. DTM for iSeries is functioning smoothly in their environment and CIBC recently started testing the second and improved version of the product.