Legacy Modernization to Cloud for a Large US-based Grocery and Natural Food Distributor

Client 

One of the largest and most respected pure-play grocery and natural distributors with more than 6,800 employees and 19 distribution centers across North America. Their products include dry and refrigerated items, grocery products, confectionery, vitamins, minerals, supplements, and personal care products. 

Challenges

The client’s primary challenge revolved around maintaining legacy infrastructure, which in turn led to complex interdependencies. The challenges have been listed:

• Longer time-to-market, owing to the system’s lack of agility and flexibility
• The legacy AS/400 applications were difficult to maintain due to the monolithic architecture and complex interdependencies
• Very limited data analytical capabilities, apart from scalability issues
• Building the new distribution center was time-consuming due to extensive local customizations, making it difficult to replicate the applications in other regions 

Solution

To address these issues and kickstart their digital modernization journey, the client opted for a gradual transition to AWS cloud, starting with re-engineering of their core services.

The transformation was executed in two phases.Phase one was the assessment of legacy applications identified to be migrated to cloud. LTM performed a deep dive assessment, leveraging indigenous tools, and generated the modernization roadmap that included the current state understanding, target state architecture, modernization solution, execution approach, timeline, efforts, risks, dependencies, etc.

Phase two was to re-engineer the sales onboarding application from RPGLE/CL/DB400 to .Net Core/RDS PostgreSQL and deploy on AWS cloud. The batch jobs and reports on AS400 were implemented using the AWS Lambda function in the target system. LTM’s in-house tools were leveraged for reverse engineering, code refactoring, and DB/data migration to accelerate the modernization.

The target architecture was mainly composed of serverless services such as AWS Lambda, step functions, and ActiveMQ/SQS queues, which provided high availability to the solution. This solution was deployed using a serverless framework for repeatability and consistency across different regions. 

Benefits

Collaborating with the client’s teams, LTM delivered comprehensive benefits, ranging from increased cost savings to quicker time-to-market. The benefits have been listed:

• 20-30% indirect cost savings due to reduced time-to-market
• 25% improvement in productivity
• Improved performance due to workload transfer from on-premises to the cloud
• Lower operational costs with easy-to-maintain cloud-native applications
• Highly agile and robust service-based target systems
• Improved flexibility on the front-end through microservices-based architecture