Modernizing a Major Distribution Network With Rocket^® Visual COBOL^®

Company

Industry: Business Services

A large North American business services company with thousands of partners relies on a complex backend ERP system, enhanced with custom COBOL modules, to process millions of orders.

Challenge

The company's heritage COBOL system needed to be replaced. But it was essential to preserve critical business logic while gaining adaptability without downtime.

The company relied on valuable business logic in its COBOL applications. When its ERP provider announced it would no longer support COBOL, thousands of custom modules were left unsupported. This major risk coupled with an outdated development environment made it difficult to adapt to business changes, and constantly rewriting code for ERP upgrades was unsustainable. They needed to modernize without losing functionality or starting from scratch.

Solution

Rocket Visual COBOL delivered a modern development platform that allowed for seamless integration with other systems and provided enhanced product interfaces for end-users.

Since a complete rewrite wasn't feasible, the organization chose Rocket Visual COBOL to bridge the gap. The code conversion was straightforward and supported by comprehensive training, so the team was able to move to a modern IDE for more intuitive and efficient development. This transition opened up new talent acquisition opportunities and empowered the IT team to address challenging user requests, such as integrating mapping tools to quickly pinpoint network partners.

Results

Visual COBOL created a more efficient development environment, preserving decades of business logic while enabling substantial interface enhancements and fostering a dynamic new partnership.

With Rocket Visual COBOL, the organization protected its long-term investment by retaining over 20 years of COBOL business logic within a modern workflow. This transition fostered stronger collaboration between developers and end-users, who now actively contribute to process improvements. As a result, the IT department evolved from a support function into a strategic business partner and helped improve the company's agility and positioning for future success.

Get started with Rocket Visual COBOL

Transitioning heritage systems to a modern platform doesn’t have to be daunting. With Rocket Visual COBOL, you can preserve critical business logic while seamlessly modernizing workflows.