Company Overview:
This client is a large publicly traded electronic payment processor with an extremely large System Z mainframe footprint. They service the credit/debit card industry and provide customer account management software to their clients.
Business Challenge:
The client has a very mature, but aging 3270 environment for their entry level customers, and subsequently was losing market share to smaller competitors with rich web interfaces. The cost to replace the system was prohibitive and prior attempts resulted in new service tiers that provided a rich interface and handled 80% of the calls, but only accounted for 20% or less of the green screen functionality. This meant the client's customers still required host access software to be installed on CSR workstations for those call exceptions. It also meant that some customer service reps still had to be trained on the aging interface.
Solution:
Strongback Consulting was engaged to implement Rational HATS to transform 100% of the green screen applications for their entry level offering. We first trained the client in HATS development and then designed the initial project development environment and application development standards. This allowed the client to roll on junior developers and cross train them from COBOL or .NET to HATS and Java EE development. Strongback also setup build scripts and agents to help in automated deployment to a clustered WebSphere Application Server ND environment.
Results:
Training time for the new HATS enabled web interface reduced training time for new CSR's by nearly 75%. HATS was able to transform 100% of the 3270 applications to a rich web interface application which was easier to implement into new clients as only a web browser was needed for the CSR workstation. The application was launched as a pilot after less than 3 months from the project start, and was so successful that old clients are requesting the product, while the client's sales personnel are finding new customers whom they previously could not sell to because of the green screen interfaces.
Industry:
Financial
Products, Technologies:
- IBM Rational Host Access Transformation Services
- IBM Rational Developer for System z
- IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment
- IBM POWER 6 p570
- Java, Java EE