A Global Flooring Manufacturer

Overview

A global leader in the flooring industry, this manufacturer has long been recognized for its operational excellence, commitment to innovation, and dedication to quality. With over 22,000 employees and $6 billion in annual revenue, the company holds a leading market position in commercial and residential markets around the world.

To support its long-term digital strategy and address the growing limitations of its legacy systems, the company initiated a large-scale modernization project focused on migrating its mainframe applications to a modern cloud-based environment. The organization set out to position itself for a more agile and scalable future, yet with decades of mission-critical applications running on its IBM z/OS platform, it was critical that they preserve existing investments and ensure seamless business continuity.

Astadia was selected to lead the transformation, bringing deep mainframe modernization expertise and a proven methodology to help the company preserve existing functionality while moving to a modern platform. The engagement began with an in-depth mainframe assessment and proof-of-concept, followed by a full-scale migration built on Astadia’s Migration Factory approach.

The Challenge

For decades, the company’s IBM z/OS mainframe served as the computing backbone for critical business operations ranging from supply chain and inventory systems to internal

scheduling, ordering, reporting, and production workflows. But as operating costs continued to rise and mainframe talent grew increasingly scarce, it became clear that maintaining the status quo was no longer sustainable.

The organization faced some particular challenges in migrating a highly complex application environment. Their IBM z/OS mainframe supported thousands of COBOL programs and associated components including stored procedures, deeply intertwined with JCL batch processes, assembler, scheduling tools, and legacy databases. In total, the mainframe system comprised over 10 million lines of code. Any disruption to these systems had the potential to negatively impact daily operations across global facilities.

Company leaders recognized the need to modernize their infrastructure without interrupting day-to-day business, and without requiring staff retraining. They decided to refactor their mainframe applications and migrate to the cloud, with the goal of preserving full functional equivalency and minimizing or eliminating the need for retraining staff.

The Solution

To meet these objectives, the company partnered with Astadia to migrate its mainframe environment to Microsoft Azure. Leveraging its innovative Migration Factory methodology and toolset, Astadia delivered an end-to-end modernization plan designed to convert source code, replatform databases, modernize batch processing, and adapt all necessary integrations.

In the implementation phase, Astadia worked closely with client and partner teams to implement the new architecture, refactoring existing code from COBOL to Java, converting batch jobs to modern scripting languages, and migrating the IBM DB2 database to Microsoft Azure SQL Server.

The Astadia Migration Factory provides fully automated code conversion, database migration, and testing. Using these tools, Astadia conducted exhaustive testing using scripts derived from actual user activity. This provided the project’s executive sponsors and IT leaders with a high level of confidence, both in the progress of the project and in Astadia’s capacity to deliver a refactored, replatformed system with full functional equivalency.

Astadia also provided deployment support, documentation, training, and knowledge transfer to support the long-term maintainability of the new system. The project was structured to allow the company to further enhance and evolve the new environment following deployment.

The Results

The organization has successfully transitioned its core application portfolio from IBM z/OS to a modern, cloud-based architecture running on Microsoft Azure. The new environment

is functionally equivalent to the company’s legacy systems, offering improved agility, maintainability, and cost-efficiency. The organization is no longer dependent on a dwindling pool of mainframe talent, alleviating its challenges in hiring and retaining staff.

By eliminating its reliance on legacy mainframe infrastructure, the company is now better positioned to accelerate innovation, reduce operational risk, and scale its digital capabilities to meet the needs of a global marketplace. Thanks to its partnership with Astadia, the organization has not only preserved decades of investment in custom applications; it has laid the groundwork for the next era of growth and transformation.