MDA Success Story: National Services Industries  

The following is an abstract of an MDA success story from National Services Industries. The complete story will be posted in Fall 2003.

Contact: Stanley J. Sewall US (+1) 404.307.2643 Email: stan.sewall@juno.com  Messaging: 4043072643@mobile.att.net

Model Driven Architecture (Abstract)

National Service Industries is a company founded during World War I in Atlanta Georgia. National Service Industries has two business models with textile rental linen and industrial packaging. His charter was to modernize the company's financial and production management system that was distributed throughout 60 sites supporting 8,000 end users. The 30-year old legacy system (based on DOS technology: UBB/ISAM) consisted of the following software modules:

• Customer Management;
• Item Management
• Order Entry;
• Logistics;
• Inventory Control;
• Accounts Receivable;
• Point-of-Sale;
• Reporting;
• Demand Planning.

Mr. Sewall worked with C-level, Vice Presidents with cross-functional interests, and subject matter experts to construct a modern J2EE web-based system (J2EE, JSP, EJB, Struts, J2ME, MQSeries, and RDBMS) while still supporting the legacy system. The original estimate to modernize the application was 5.5 years at a cost of $5.5 million in 1997($7.0 Million Today). Executive management decided not to modernize the system, and suspend all application development on the ERP System for 5 years.

Mr. Sewall brought his Model Driven Methodology to reengineer the legacy application suite in 10 months at the cost of $1.1 million. With this investment, the company was able to reduce infrastructure cost by $20 million/year and drive an additional $10 million to the bottom line in collateral cost savings.

Recently, he was nominated by the Standish Group ( www.standishgroup.com ), which is an independent consortium of technology and end-user companies, for the coveted CLASS Award for outstanding executive project leadership for his skills with Model Driven Architecture.