Kühne + Nagel gets remarkable ROI on GiAPA,

saving one million Euros

Despite the fact that hardware gets less and less expensive, the total cost for additional CPU, main storage and/or discs can be huge - and sometimes seems unnecessarily high.

The international logistics company Kühne + Nagel (AG & Co.) KG was even in 2005 one of Germanys largest iSeries users, in those days having a number of 890-models. The IT department had noticed that the increase in per cent of IT hardware costs exceeded the growth of number of transactions, so they decided to form taskforce to change this ratio.

They had learned that the Danish company iPerformance ApS offered performance improvements on a 'no cure - no pay' basis: If an application could not be speeded up by 25 %, no invoice was issued. The Kühne & Nagel taskforce therefore asked iPerformance to support them in optimizing a batch job. When the result - an 80 % reduction of the run time - was beyond expectations, it was decided to analyze all jobs on the production systems.

But rather than having thousands of jobs and programs analyzed one at the time under the “no cure, no pay” scheme, Kühne + Nagel decided to buy a license for GiAPA, the tool used (and produced) by iPerformance. This tool can automatically and simultaneously collect data for and analyze all active jobs.

The results were in 2010 presented by Michael Albrecht, responsible for the performance analysis of the international standard applications in the Kühne + Nagel head office in Hamburg. He described a large number of run time improvements achieved by implementing the optimization potential pointed to by GiAPA. The bottom line was astonishing:

The total savings reached almost € 1.000.000 (approx. US $ 1.2 million) without including the significant business benefits due to improved run times.

Business growth has in the meantime forced Kühne und Nagel to upgrade hardware several times. Today newer Power servers are used, and several GiAPA licenses for their additional machines have been purchased.