Moving off its mainframe has allowed Southern Farm Bureau Life Insurance (SFBLI) to achieve its strategic information system goals. Having one common computing platform simplifies its environment and allows SFBLI's IS team to focus more on the business rather than the issues associated with supporting more than one system.

Avanade’s responsiveness and flexibility, and SFBLI employees’ synergy, created a strong team that never missed a beat.

SFBLI was established in 1946 to address its membership’s specific needs relating to life insurance and financial planning. Today, its organisation has branched into cities and towns all over the American South.

There were several challenges the IT department was facing, with the key concern being an aging workforce of experienced mainframe application developers and systems programmers nearing retirement. Many of these individuals would be leaving within five years, creating a vast loss of knowledge with regards to mainframe operations. Additionally, it was becoming more challenging to recruit college graduates with mainframe knowledge.

Doing something as expensive and time consuming as rewriting or replacing the policy administration system that the company ran on was not a viable option. SFBLI quickly realized this would mean hiring additional developers, which would be expensive and time consuming. The Avanade solution was much faster and less expensive, and the migration project was completed within the required time frame.

NOTE: This story describes work that was completed by Asysco, which was acquired by Avanade in November 2022.

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