COMPANY OVERVIEW

A leader in grocery retail with an exceptional focus on brick and mortar customer experience. As one of the largest private companies in the U.S. Headquartered in Rochester, New York, they have a strong community presence putting both their customers and employees first.

THE CHALLENGE

Modernizing the replacement of business critical legacy applications.

Legacy applications often have feature sets that constrain business growth and efficiency; they can also put organizations at risk due to increased costs and limited in-house expertise. Mainframe migration is no small undertaking. Forming a strategy of where to start and how to scale the effort required strong client/vendor collaboration.

Moving away from the mainframe and into the cloud offers many opportunities for improvement: cost reduction, building more efficient logical programs, incorporating modern data sources, refining business processes, enabling on-demand scaling, and seamless regional failover among a few of them. But there is risk in doing too much at once; with simultaneous changes occurring at the logical, data, and process levels, a manageable solution would need to decouple dependencies and introduce efficiency.

THE RESULTS

Modern applications running in the cloud with expanded features, enhanced scalability, reduced cost, and seamless failover

Approach and Implementation

Solü posed a suite of solution options – varying in scale, level of risk, and complexity – giving the client the power to lead the direction of the project. Solü started by conducting several research spikes to inventory and analyze the mainframe applications and develop solution options including technical approach and delivery plan. Solü refined the solution options with the support of client technical and business resources, prior to moving forward with project implementation. Solü tailored its Agile practices and focused on automation to improve quality and reduce effort associated with simple conversion activities.

Solü built automated conversion tools, established repeatable analysis, estimation, and development processes, and involved the client’s engineering team throughout the project lifecycle. In addition, Solü introduced full automated BDD (Behavior Driven Development) testing that exercised and tested all our deliverables as well as their implementation on each and every release to ensure complete integration and functional end-to-end testing.

Above and Beyond

Beyond achieving the primary goal of migrating programs off the mainframe, Solü developed tools and defined a repeatable process that will make subsequent conversions from COBOL/JCL more streamlined and predictable.