A Grocery Chain’s Journey

Overview

A large regional supermarket chain, frequently named one of the best companies to work for in the United States, is known for combining exceptional customer service with operational excellence. With the goal of being the very best in the industry, the brand is widely recognized for outstanding innovation. With over a century of retail history and more than 100 stores across the northeast and mid-Atlantic states, the company continues to evolve, striving to meet and exceed the expectations of today’s consumers.

To ensure long-term viability and simplify operations, the organization launched a strategic initiative to migrate its IBM z/OS mainframe environment to a modern on-premises platform. They aimed to achieve this without disrupting business operations, and without requiring extensive retraining for employees. Partnering with Astadia, the grocer set out to achieve full functional equivalency for its mission-critical applications while unlocking the flexibility, agility, and affordability of modern technologies.

The Challenge

This leading grocery retailer relied on a complex IBM z/OS mainframe environment to power its most mission-critical functions, including core inventory, end-to-end supply chain management, and store operations. The legacy environment included nearly 1000 COBOL applications and copybooks, Assembler programs, and JCL scripts alongside a collection of IDMS databases and ADS/O components.

This infrastructure had supported the company’s business operations for decades, but like many legacy mainframe systems, it presented a growing set of challenges, including steadily escalating operating costs and a limited capacity for integration with modern technologies. The company has faced hiring challenges as well, due to the increasing scarcity of skilled mainframe experts.

Leaders at the company recognized that modernization was essential if they were to sustain their high standards for operational excellence and innovation.

The Solution

To ensure a smooth transition, the company partnered with Astadia, long established as the leaders in mainframe modernization. Astadia’s proprietary Migration Factory methodology and toolset presented the retailer with a proven path to success, combining code conversion, database migration, testing, and data validation within a single platform. By fully automating and integrating these processes, the Migration Factory not only offers a cost-effective path to modernization; it also allows for exhaustive testing to ensure a smooth transition with complete confidence. This project included automated conversion of COBOL and other legacy code to C#, along with the migration of the company’s IDMS databases to Oracle’s modern relational database platform. Astadia converted the retailer’s JCL batch jobs into modern, script-based processes as well, replatforming the company’s mainframe applications to Microsoft Windows.

Astadia also executed a rigorous testing and validation process based on test scripts built from actual user activity, ensuring that the migrated system was functionally equivalent and that system performance met expectations.

The Results

The regional grocery chain has successfully moved its mission-critical applications from the legacy IBM z/OS mainframe system to a modern Windows platform, running on-premises. Astadia’s Migration Factory methodology and toolset offered a proven path for a smooth, confident transition.

The project has delivered a range of benefits.

• Seamless transition: Astadia delivered full functional equivalence of business applications in the new environment, with no disruption to users, and no need for retraining.
• Modernized architecture: With their systems now converted to C# and running atop Oracle databases, this leading grocery retailer is better positioned to integrate with external applications and maintain its proprietary technology going forward.
• Cost and risk reduction: The modernization project has eliminated the problem of escalating mainframe operating costs, and has mitigated the company’s significant hiring challenges.

Thanks to its partnership with Astadia, one of the most innovative grocery chains in the world has successfully preserved its decades of investment in mission-critical applications. In doing so, they have unlocked a range of modern capabilities and set the stage to further streamline IT operations. The organization is now well-positioned to pursue innovation and ensure long-term resilience across its enterprise systems.