Yale New Haven Health

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“As part of our cost-cutting initiatives, we were happy to be able to shut down our mainframe. After having gone through this project, re-hosting is a process we would definitely recommend to other organizations.” Mark Lafferty, Director of Health Systems Applications and Integration Yale New Haven Health System

 

The Yale New Haven Health System is comprised of Bridgeport, Greenwich, and Yale-New Haven Hospitals. Yale New Haven Health offers patients a full range of health care services of the highest quality, from primary care to the most complex care available anywhere in the world.

Business Situation

After moving their larger applications, Yale New Haven had a small number of applications and databases still left running on their IBM mainframe. It made no sense to maintain a large and expensive mainframe just for these technologies so Yale decided to re-host them on a Microsoft Windows platform.

Value to Business

Yale reduced their operational costs and benefitted from a variety of other advantages associated with the newer technology.

Technology Enablers

XFRAME

OpenCOBOL

XBM Batch Manager

Challenges

In their drive to reduce IT operation costs, Yale New Haven Health System decided to move two large applications from their IBM mainframe system to a third-party outsourcing facility.

Following this move, a collection of small, unconnected database fi les and programs were the only technologies left running on Yale’s mainframe server. In order to shut down their mainframe completely, they needed to migrate these batch processing programs to another, less expensive platform. As Yale New Haven investigated different hardware and platform options, their choices were guided by price, technology and the type of experience shared by their in-house resources. Due to an excellent relationship with Microsoft and the competitive pricing, Yale New Haven finally chose Microsoft Windows as their target platform. Yale’s hardware vendor, Hewlett-Packard, was familiar with Fresche’s expertise in legacy modernization and recommended that Yale contact Fresche for information on the best type of modernization solution for them. Yale chose Fresche to perform the migration based on their competitive pricing, the type of solution proposed and their excellent reputation.

The Solution

The programs still residing on Yale’s mainframe were written in COBOL and JCL. Fresche converted the code within four weeks using XFRAME software, a re-hosting solution for mainframe modernization. By using an automated suite of tools, Fresche completed the migration quickly, at a fraction of the cost, with no compromises in speed or system integrity. The COBOL to OpenCOBOL conversion was easy and seamless with 99% of the code migrated directly from the XFRAME product. The JCL migration to Windows Javascript was also fully automated and required no manual intervention. Furthermore, JCL constructs were mimicked in the Javascript code so the learning curve was minimal for Yale’s internal resources - they saw the same constructs.

The final stages of testing and implementation turned out to be more of a challenge due to competing priorities and this extended the project somewhat. On the other hand, Yale found that issue resolution and turnaround was smoother and quicker than expected as a result of the expertise displayed by Fresche’s professional services team. Yale New Haven was also impressed by the professionalism of Fresche’s project sales and support team.

Results

Yale New Haven Health System considers their mainframe re-hosting project a success and counts many benefits to their organization. First and foremost are the substantial cost savings they experience by eliminating their large mainframe server. The move to newer technology also brings their organization improved performance with programs running 50% to 70% faster than before the re-hosting project. The project resulted in improved business agility with Yale New Haven being better able to respond quickly to the requirements of business units. Additionally, the move to newer technology brings them improved access to data and reporting, improved maintainability and better integration with the rest of the business. Other benefi ts include a consolidation of existing technologies and some minor job step elimination for Yale’s end users. Having obtained the results they had expected, Yale judges the project successful and worth recommending to other companies.

Benefits

  • Cost reductions
  • 50% to 70% increase in performance
  • Superior business agility
  • Enhanced access to data and reporting
  • Quicker response to business requirements
  • Technology consolidation
  • Improved maintainability and integration