Business Process Refinements & Enhancements

"We are under pressure to deliver business process refinements and enhancements faster"

The existing COBOL applications are satisfying current online and batch business processes well but there are increasing demands for business process updates and enhancements like:-

• We need a more automated sign-off process so we can respond to customers faster
• We have to update processes to adhere to another compliance requirement or regulation
• Performance of batch process X needs improved so we can guarantee next day delivery    

Servicing requirements via re-use

It’s hard to define "typical" scenarios that require changes to core business processing logic as there are so many. However, we have attempted to categorise these as increased automation and simplification of business processes, implementing compliance requirements that impact your business processes and improving performance.

We can safely say that whatever the specific requirement is, if your existing systems are written in COBOL then re-using these applications will always be the faster, lowest risk approach.

So, if you are being asked to deliver more updates faster, with no additional resource, how can Micro Focus help you?

This is where the Micro Focus COBOL Technology solution can deliver the most value.

• Firstly your developers should have the most productive development environment. We have proven that developer productivity can be increased by as much as 50% compared with traditional COBOL development environments, so having the correct development tooling could make a dramatic impact in your ability to deliver faster.
• For optimal working, your organization should be using COBOL analysis technology  on a day by day basis and when addressing compliance issues. Utilizing assessment technology to automatically find where all changes must be made and the ripple effect of any changes before making them significantly reduces business risk as well as avoiding huge amounts of rework and re-testing.
• If you need to increase batch system performance then Micro Focus can help in a number of ways. We can help run the process on the faster servers on the market and our optimized execution environment will ensure the specific processor is utilized to the full. For example, once customer reported that a key batch process that took over two hours to complete on a small mainframe environment completed in just 7 minutes on an Intel processor.
• There are host of capabilities available within the Micro Focus products which can be used to help satisfy these requirements, for example, one customer utilized our XML capabilities to dramatically improve the efficiency of a specific business process.
• If you are looking at your ability to deliver faster from a strategic point of view then you may be considering moving to a Services Oriented Architecture and looking at whether adopting Web services is something that makes sense for you. If so Micro Focus can help ensure you can re-use you existing COBOL-based processes within your chosen strategic architecture.