Leading HR and Payroll Solutions Provider

Overview

A leading global provider of payroll and HR solutions, our client makes life and work easier for employees and organizational leaders. Offering a range of flexible outsourcing solutions, the company serves clients in 150 countries, easing compliance, improving employee satisfaction, and enabling organizations to focus on their core activities. The HR and technology consultants at the company provide thorough analysis, expert advice, real-world insights and state-of-the-art technology solutions.

For decades, our client ran their operations on an IDMS database, with COBOL-based applications that were carefully tuned to deliver high performance for the company’s intensive workloads. IT leaders in the organization recognized that their outdated technology was acting as a barrier to innovation.

They doubted whether it was possible to modernize their systems while maintaining the high levels of performance they had worked so hard to maintain. Astadia helped them modernize their systems, lowering costs and paving the way for agile innovation.

Challenge

The organization relies on intensive batch processes to calculate payroll and taxes for a vast number of employees around the world. Their IDMS-based system was heavily tuned to deliver high performance for that computationally intensive task.

The cost of operating their mainframe system had steadily increased over the years, and the company predicted that the upward trend would continue into the foreseeable future. At the same time, it was getting more and more difficult to attract and hire employees with the knowledge and expertise necessary to maintain their aging mainframe systems. In particular, it was virtually impossible to find people familiar with Broadcom IDMS.

The company also wanted to increase organizational agility. Integrating external applications with their IDMS database was difficult, and their use of old technology was acting as a barrier to innovation.

Although these problems had existed for some time, many of the company’s leaders believed that modernizing their systems would be excessively painful and disruptive. Consequently, they had hesitated to embark on a mainframe modernization project.

Rising costs, a shrinking talent pool, and barriers to innovation eventually compelled leaders at the company to move forward.

They needed a partner who could help them transition with confidence—preserving what worked while replacing what held them back.

Solution

After a thorough and exhaustive vetting process, the client chose to work with Astadia. They were impressed with the company’s breadth and depth of experience, and they saw clear benefits in Astadia’s FastTrack Migration Factory technology, which delivers faster results at a lower cost, while dramatically reducing risk.

IT Leaders at the organization valued the high-performance power and reliability of their mainframe system. They understood that by moving to a modern relational database, they could alleviate most of the problems they were experiencing with their legacy systems.

The company chose to migrate their IDMS network model database to IBM’s Db2 relational database. They opted to keep their computationally intensive batch execution processes on the mainframe, moving online processing to a Windows platform.

Webinar: How to migrate valuable IDMS systems to modern, mainstream technologies using automated migration and testing tools.

Using the FastTrack Migration Factory, Astadia helped them fully automate the database migration and code conversion processes. Using the Migration Factory’s automated tools, they converted the company’s existing on-line code from Enterprise COBOL to MicroFocus COBOL off mainframe. Astadia also used their suite of automation tools to exhaustively test the new system, ensuring that it was functionally equivalent to the original.

White paper: Learn how FastTrack industrializes the process of mainframe migration

Astadia also worked to make certain that the new system would need the demanding performance specifications that client required.

This hybrid modernization approach helped SD Worx avoid unnecessary disruption while creating a future-ready platform aligned with modern development practices.

Results

Astadia successfully completed the modernization project moving the company to a more flexible and adaptable platform while maintaining enterprise-grade performance and reliability, especially for critical batch processes.

Moreover, the company is recognizing significant cost savings by reducing many of the costs associated with the IDMS database.

Now that they are using more modern technologies, the organization has access to a larger pool of skilled developers and a faster path to innovative developments that benefit the company, their clients, and the employees they serve.

In short, the modernization delivered business agility without sacrificing performance—a key success factor for any technology transformation in financial services.

Contact our team to learn how modernization became a strategic enabler—not a risk.

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