ASNA Success Stories
Extending and enhancing the IBM i and Microsoft platforms since 1982
Marine Harbor Management
Region
US and beyond
Project type
IBM i RPG 400 migration to C#
Lines of code migrated
500K
Database
IBM i DB2
Products
Monarch, ASNA Services, DataGate for SQL Server
Customer Profile
A large waterway logistics company specializing in marine shipments, harbor management, and terminal services across the US coasts, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. For decades, they relied on a heavily customized RPG application running on an AS/400 for transportation/cargo management, a system crucial to their unique business workflows.
Business Challenge
With the RPG team nearing retirement, the company faced a significant business continuity risk. The RPG application, while serving them well, represented a growing dependency that would be difficult to maintain with next-generation programmers. Maintaining uninterrupted business operations was paramount.
Options Considered
The company considered various options, but rewriting the application, comprising around 300 modules and hundreds of thousands of RPG lines with limited documentation, was deemed too costly and time-consuming. Canned packages also proved unsuitable due to necessary process changes and extensive customization needs. They then opted for platform migration, as it offered a predictable outcome by retaining shared data, enabling a gradual rollout, and preserving user familiarity.
Why ASNA?
The company chose ASNA Monarch and C# for the migration. Monarch offered the best value and ASNA’s history with the midrange community gave them confidence. The Monarch solution also allowed an incremental deployment approach, keeping the database on IBM i and selectively migrating parts of the application. Less critical parts could remain on the IBM i or be rewritten later.
ASNA’s Services Team handled the global assessment and migration, while the company’s team focused on testing, remediation, and deployment.
In this success story, the ASNA Services Team performed the assessment of the original RPG application and performed the migration; the company's focused on testing, remediation, and deployment.
However, some businesses, usually those with larger developer teams, may opt to perform the migration themselves. The ASNA Monarch migration model is very flexible. You pick the model that works for you!
However, some businesses, usually those with larger developer teams, may opt to perform the migration themselves. The ASNA Monarch migration model is very flexible. You pick the model that works for you!
Implementation
Following an initial assessment and a proof-of-concept with a smaller module, ASNA performed a detailed global assessment. This resulted in a migration roadmap detailing which RPG parts would be migrated, identified functional gaps and their replacements, and provided a migration schedule to enable resource planning.
Business Benefit
ASNA successfully delivered a robust C# version of the marine logistics application. This transition eliminated a dangerous RPG dependency, modernized the application, and transferred control to the C# programming team. And, the RPG team did retire and are fully enjoying their time on the beach!