Migrating a leading multi-line insurer’s legacy Gen application to COBOL
The Client
Our client is part of a leading multi-line insurer that serves its customers in global and local markets.
With approximately 55,000 employees, our client provides a wide range of property and casualty, and life insurance products and services in more than 215 countries and territories.
The Challenge
Our client wanted to reduce the costs and operational risks surrounding their platform for calculating and disbursing commissions, which was written in CA Gen. Having very little in-house resource to support the code, our client decided to migrate their CA Gen application (consisting of four models) to COBOL.
For this they needed a solution provider with extensive CA Gen knowledge and experience in major change projects to complete the migration project, whilst ensuring that any business knowledge potentially lost through outsourcing throughout the (dears was obtained.
Additionally, the CA Gen migration project needed to span multiple geographies; provide functionally equivalent, hand-maintainable code; adhere to our client’s compliance and Quality Assurance protocols; and be delivered within a tight 12-month timeframe.
The Solution
- Discovery Exercise: The discovery exercise which utilised TXP’s automated analysis tooling enabled TXP to extract detailed information from the CA Gen models to support our client’s decision-making process and overcome any issues relating to lost business knowledge and to understand scope, complexity, timeframe, process and challenges of the migration.
- Proof of Concept (POC): An initial POC was executed on a small portion of the CA Gen application to demonstrate the solution’s viability and identify any additional requirements.
- Migrate CA Gen: A full migration was completed across two phases utilising customised code generators to support our client’s unique company requirements.
- Application tailoring following migration: TXP used a ‘PostProcessing’ approach to implement further changes in migrated code.
The Benefits
The benefits that our client were able to realise as a result of the migration included:
- Reduced cost and operational risk thanks to no further application dependency on CA Gen
- A highly performant application
- Successfully migrated within 9 months including warranty support
- No loss of business or application knowledge
- Easier to maintain and update in the future due to knowledge transfer and access to greater availability of COBOL skill