Case Study: Foyer Group Modernizes Legacy Systems, Achieves Enhanced Agility and Cost Efficiency with Astadia

A key player in the economic and financial landscape of Luxembourg, Foyer has been a leader of the local insurance market since its inception. Today, the company has a presence in several European countries through its three businesses: insurance, protection, and wealth management.

The decision to modernize was aligned with the company’s objectives on three main levels:

• Strategic: The legacy systems hosting the Group’s strategic applications were seen as a brake on development and digital transformation initiatives. Improved agility was needed to meet the needs of the business and ensure future competitiveness in a constantly evolving environment.
• Economic: Due to the expense of operating and scaling the mainframe, replacing it with more open and economically viable architectures offered the opportunity to reduce infrastructure and operating costs significantly.
• Risk reduction: Skills related to mainframe technologies were becoming increasingly scarce, as the vast majority of available human resources became oriented to "new technologies." Modernization offered an opportunity to shift to widely supported modern platforms.

The challenge

• Synchronize and coordinate with different parties (Foyer, Astadia, Synchrony and Xact) to migrate the system with uniform technology
• Migrate to ISO-functionality
• Address potential obstacles in meeting the project’s timeframes due to the COVID 19 pandemic.

The project

The team opted for a modernization approach that would transform the legacy mainframe systems – built with COBOL and EGL – to a contemporary Linux and Java-based platform. This decision balanced the need for strong returns on investment with reasonable project timelines. Given the intricate nature of Foyer’s core business systems, the project demanded specialized expertise. Astadia brought their deep knowledge of COBOL-CICS migrations, while Synchrony (US) and Xact (Denmark) provided essential EGL technology expertise.

1. Assessment and POC phase
The assessment revealed that a significant number of diverse components of the system were interconnected. A migration method and target technology had to be determined for each of those components. The POC needed to demonstrate the feasibility of the migration and integration of the most complex parts of the system.

2. Factory certification (FC) phase 
During this phase, the team synchronized and fine-tuned all migration tools, established testing methods, and set up the infrastructure needed for initial execution and testing of migrated components. The phase concluded when the tools successfully migrated all system components and initial smoke tests confirmed individual programs worked correctly.

3. Factory exit (FE) phase 
The migration of a complete production dataset was tested several times for correctness and to measure the lead time. Plans were also designed for the training of the various teams to ensure effective maintenance of the migrated system after the GO-LIVE.

4. System integration (SIT) testing phase 
The team consolidated all previous phases’ work on the infrastructure designated for System Integration Testing (SIT). To develop comprehensive test scenarios for both online transactions and batch processes, application specialists’ mainframe activities were extensively monitored and documented. While the SIT phase was underway, Foyer began planning end-user testing in consultation with business teams. The technical teams received training across essential technologies including Java, Dojo, Bash, Linux, IntelliJ, Git, and DB2 LUW, with access to a sandbox environment for hands-on practice. In parallel, the team proceeded with the installation of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and production systems.

5. User acceptance testing (UAT) phase 
During the UAT phase, Foyer’s technical team continued batch test execution using the job scheduler. The online part of the system was tested by end users, who applied their own scenarios to verify that the migrated system met all business requirements.

6. GO-LIVE phase
The code freeze period began 6 weeks before the go-live date. Just prior to this, Astadia completed a final migration of the entire system and ran successful regression tests. Throughout the project until the code freeze began, Foyer continued its mainframe development work without any business interruption. The team successfully transitioned from the old to the new system over a single weekend. As planned, the mainframe system was retired several weeks later.