Overview Hamburg-based Peek & Cloppenburg is one of Germany’s largest retailers of quality cloth- ing from respected labels. The company has more than 2,500 employees and 26 branches across Germany and Poland. Challenge Peek & Cloppenburg had run its mission- critical enterprise resource management sys- tem on a mainframe since the early eighties. Programmed in COBOL and implemented on an IBM 390 host system, the system con- trolled the company’s entire merchandise movements, from ordering and delivery to the cash desk. Essentially, the core operative functions of the company. This had worked well, but Peek & Cloppenburg needed to find an alternative to the mainframe for two main reasons: The system’s high per- formance made it very expensive, and the VSE platform was simply no

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