Amalgamated Financial Group (AFG), headquartered in New Jersey, provides the US’s leading transportation and commercial companies with a multitude of financial solutions within the bill-to-bank receivable arena.

AFG’s IT department had been running COBOL, LINC and Reporter III applications for years. Applications including billing, customer care, dispute resolution and collections, and a cash application comprised the company’s revenue recovery process. As with any collection service, it also had a number of external interfaces that needed to be preserved. Although this environment had served AFG well, as business increased, it needed a system that would give it the ability to grow the company and save money. It also needed an integrated, cost-effective migration process from the mainframe to client server architecture with a relational database.

Avanade’s migration technology, AMT LION, specializes in Unisys mainframe migrations to a Windows environment powered by a SQL database. AFG chose AMT LION to meet all of its needs, including:

• The ability to migrate LINC, COBOL, Reporter III and Work Flow into a single programming environment
• The ability to migrate AFG’s DMS II hierarchical database into a relational SQL database
• A solution that would allow it to respond to development issues faster
• Saving money on mainframe and maintenance costs
• The ability to modernize its legacy applications

Following a major hurricane, AFG decided to move its applications to the cloud. Once complete, the company realized that, along with cost savings and increased availability, there were additional benefits to running its applications on Microsoft Azure with Avanade.

With AMT LION, AFG has improved in the following technical areas:

• Batch production processing time improved by 50%, from seven hours to 3.5 hours
• Delivery time for reports reduced drastically, from 2-3 days to same-day service
• Overall average response time has improved from 4-6 seconds on the mainframe to 2-3 seconds
• Migration development backlog estimated around 8-10 months was completed in less than four months
• Application changes and database reorganizations have dramatically improved, affecting system uptime positively

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

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