ID Logistics is one of the leading operators in the world delivering goods for the retail and textile industries. With the acquisition of Logiters, the company positioned itself as one of the largest operators in Spain and Portugal, extending their expertise to the automotive, pharmaceutical, healthcare and electronics industries. They are also expanding their presence globally as well, now operating more than 6 million square meters of warehousing facilities at 320 sites across seventeen countries in Europe, North America, South America, Asia and Africa. ID Logistics has over 22,000 employees globally and is headquarted in Orgon, France.
The company has been trusting IBM i and IBM® Power® for over 25 years, starting with the System/38. The majority of all transactions for ID Logistics run on IBM i, including a critical logistics application built in-house the company relies on to keep their operations running smoothly. Their main IBM i production environment in France is used to run applications for all other countries, so it is important to be on a platform they can rely on without having to worry about downtime or outages. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, brought along new challenges for ID Logistics like never seen before.
Because of lockdowns worldwide and more people staying at home and shopping online, ID Logistics’ retail and ecommerce clients suddenly saw a spike in demand, placing extra stress on their IT infrastructure and logistics applications. The company wanted to move to an environment where they could have the flexibility to scale up quickly without having to increase costs from purchasing additional hardware or acquiring new resources. They also did not want to have to worry about high availability or security, as their IT teams already had enough demand placed on them as it was with the pandemic. ID Logistics soon started looking at a move to IBM i and Power in a cloud environment.
With help from IBM, the company migrated to Power Virtual Server for their business-critical infrastructure and applications. The new environment in the cloud consists of Power running IBM i. With the move to cloud, ID Logistics does not have to worry about maintaining high availability or security on their own, freeing their teams to focus on other business priorities during the pandemic. This has allowed the company to focus on their clients during a time where they need the most support.
In addition to the migration to IBM® Power® Virtual Server, ID Logistics also worked with IBM Champion for Power Koen Decorte and his company CD-Invest to modernize the critical logistics application they use to run their company. The CD-Invest team helped them move from a traditional 5250 green screen to a more modern web interface for the application, while adding multi-language support at the same time. Using the CDVTS tool from CD-Invest, the application can be translated on the fly as well, allowing it to be used in any one of the seventeen countries across the globe they operate in. The entire modernization project for the application was completed in under three months and has drastically improved productivity for both developers and business users alike within the company.