Customer modernizes decades-old legacy applications critical to enterprise infrastructure.
Owning Change in Transportation and Logistics
Mail and package shipping might be older than the internet, but that doesn’t mean the industry has been slacking when it comes to digital transformation. Our customer, a titan of e-commerce and shipping services, has been a long-time leader in digital innovation, but their legacy applications needed critical upgrades.
Legacy Application Modernization
Out With The Old, Preparing For The New
A series of core applications, many over 20 years old, served as the foundation of our customer’s core business infrastructure. Maintaining support for legacy applications is costly and inefficient—but modernizing them is a complex process that must be handled by experts to ensure no loss of data or downtime. Our customer looked for a technology partner who could build a modernization plan around hitting critical KPIs, with quality of code and accountability as top priorities.
- Code quality and reliability
- Attrition rate
- Objectives delivered
- Functional test coverage
These KPIs, along with an aggressive modernization timeline, provided a challenge that TEKsystems was more than ready to face.
Leveraging Skilled Offshore Support Teams
A Staged Delivery With Dedicated Support
There were four critical legacy applications on the list. Our approach? Assign each their own product-oriented delivery (POD) team made up of a diverse group of experts. Each team consisted of centralized governance through a highly experienced delivery manager—responsible for tracking progress—and business analysts who worked with the customer to set business goals and help translate them to technical deliverables. All team members, whether offshore or onshore, participated in daily scrum calls, and the leadership team participated in weekly status meetings and an executive-level periodic review of the program to ensure transparency at all levels.
- Created user stories and work product definitions
- Conducted PI planning sessions, sprint planning and backlog management
- Developed new code, deployed new builds and migrated builds between environments
- Completed unit testing and executed system integration testing
In addition to the core modernization efforts, we implemented several improvements to the applications’ security, optimized key integrations and oversaw critical version upgrades to improve overall performance.
of new, fully tested code delivered (as compared with less than 80% by other vendors)
Building SOWs on Outcome-Based Work
Signed, Sealed And Delivered
Modernizing an over 20-year-old business-critical application is a big ask for any third-party vendor. Why did our customer trust us to get it done? Because we started small, building a strong relationship and demonstrating our ability to deliver objectives with a KPI-based model of delivery. This instantly provided accountability on our end. TEKsystems considered the work successful only when we’d achieved all objectives that business had defined.
Personnel alone wasn’t enough—it took industry knowledge, technical skill and the ability to problem- solve to meet the customer’s goals.
Interested in a similar solution?
Real-World Results
Our customer started with four offshore teams. Today, they utilize six offshore POD teams with plans to add more as business demand increases. These teams provide legacy application modernization and production support. Our experts continue to hold daily scrum calls, documenting knowledge transfer from previous vendors, updating artifacts with current architectural and business information, and eliminating communication gaps. As the modernization process continues, the applications will become more efficient and provide an improved user experience for businesses utilizing our customer’s programs.
The support we provide will set the stage for future progress on our customer’s transformation journey. Their strategy, which includes initiatives to retire costly on-premises data centers and further optimize their core applications, will help them save an estimated $219 million to $253 million by 2026.
to onboard (as compared with 3 months by other vendors in ecosystem)
of fully tested code delivered (as compared with less than 80% by other vendors)
estimated enterprise cost savings