The Business Challenge caused by Legacy Software Systems
This Investment Manager was frustrated with the old legacy systems they had in place, it was not aligned with their business processes and making changes to it in its current form was proving expensive and taking too much time. Legacy software systems are responsible for delays and disruption. Make sure you update your outdated software to remain effective and competitive.
Team members were wasting time finding workarounds to reconcile the way the business was functioning in the present with their operating systems versus how it was in the past. They wanted something that could work now and be adapted in the future and delivered for a reasonable price within a guaranteed time frame that wasn't going to impact other projects and day-to-day operations. That is where our legacy applications and legacy software came into play.
Main Challenges posed by Legacy Software Development
- The business had progressed and the processes had been improved over time, but the already existing legacy systems functionality was not reflecting that. This made the improvements less impactful and more costly to try and retrofit into the old way of doing things that the legacy system had been built around.
- As the business was continuing to evolve any small changes that were needed to improve productivity and efficiency were costly, and the business needed new systems that would be more responsive to new business processes going forward.
- Many of the key business systems that were required for the business to function relied completely on a few people, which significantly increased the key-man dependency. Holding on to outdated technologies has proven to be very costly if not exchanged with a new system.
- Naturally the amount of data had increased over time, but this had a negative impact on the performance of the old legacy system.
- The system was based on outdated technology which made support, maintaining legacy systems and software updates very expensive and sometimes near impossible.
Key objectives:
- The project needed to be delivered in a guaranteed time frame in order to meet certain high-profile business milestones.
- The client had a perfectly capable development team in place, however with other projects and the responsibilities involved with day-to-day operations, they needed a short-term increase in their development capacity in order to proceed with the software modernization, without increasing the head count in the long-term.
- New business functionality required and likely future requirements had to be quicker and cheaper to implement going forward.
- Improve the stability and performance of the system.
- Leverage the new functionality and capabilities of updated technologies.
- Reduce key-man dependency through use of additional resources and improved documentation.
Our Solution to reengineering Legacy Software
The Investment Manager partnered with Synetec in order to deliver a system that retained all the necessary features of the old legacy system while implementing enhancements that team members needed to improve productivity. Not using internal developers allowed the potential risks of systems development to be mitigated and ensured that their business as usual activities were not impacted. The agile renovated software system is now far more adaptable to future requirements, which would prevent hesitation in potential process change and reduce expenses going forward.
Benefits of Legacy Software Modernisation
Forecasts indicate that the maintenance of the system in the future should be reduced by an estimated 20%. The internal developers gained through knowledge transfer from the Synetec development team and are in a better position to incorporate best practises into other projects.
System performance has improved by approximately 150% in some areas where users could search and manipulate large data sets, this has been attributed to the redesign of the underlying architecture and the improved performance of the current technology frameworks.
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