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Mainframe services case studies

Computacenter Mainframe Services:
Case Study - Lincoln Financial Group

Introduction

With over one million policies in force, Gloucester-based Lincoln Financial Group is a significant provider of life, pension, unit trust and ISA products in the UK. Lincoln offers this product range directly to its clients and through independent financial advisers. It has an extensive customer service operation, including a large customer contact centre and a team of advisers staffing the head-office-based personal financial advisory service.

Lincoln uses external fund managers, including Goldman Sachs Asset Management International – one of the world’s leading and most successful investment firms – providing clients with access to a level of investment expertise previously available only to corporate and institutional investors.

The UK operation is part of Lincoln National Corporation, headquartered in Philadelphia, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The corporation was founded in 1905, and is one of the USA’s leading providers of wealth accumulation, protection products and advisory services.

It is vital for financial services companies to keep their operating costs at the lowest possible levels. Looking for more efficient ways of processing is now an everyday concern for all managers.

Business Challenge

Lincoln’s director of IT explained the challenge he faced: “As an integral part of bringing our Canadian data-processing operation into the UK, and merging it with our UK data centre, we had to convert our existing VSE-based systems to OS/390.”

The main objectives of the conversion were as follows:

  • To convert all systems running on the VSE platform to the new OS/390 platform. This process had to be transparent to the users and have no negative impact on the business during and after the conversion.
  • To show improved performance and stability of the converted systems
  • To manage a smooth project and transition to OS/390, while minimising the development freeze period prior to implementation.

Lincoln recognised the significance of this conversion – the logistics and complexities of merging the data centres meant the whole project would last 12 months.

Automating conversions from one platform to another has been a feature of all Computacenter conversion services over many years.

Lincoln’s in-house team had developed middleware to support file I/O, data manipulation, transaction and screen management. This unique situation presented us with an unusual challenge. Programs being bereft of the usual operating system interfaces became both a benefit and a hindrance. However, using our conversion tool, universal migration facility (UMF), we were able to customise it to extract and modify these client-specific features, along with migrating the middleware itself from VSE to OS/390.

Solution

The Computacenter VSE – OS/390 Migration Methodology. the end result was a stable OS/390 system consisting of the combined data centres.

Result

Having zLinux available so widely made the acceptance and deployment of this new generation of solution much easier to create and much more acceptable to the target user communities.

Benefits

By developing and implementing new standards as part of the project, we were able to prepare both of the systems, and Lincoln was able to manage the system on a new platform. This was achieved by a series of controlled and managed tests prior to implementation. Once up and running with both the Canadian system and the London system on OS/390, Lincoln could set about merging the two applications.

Lincoln’s director of IT explained: “We found working with the specialist conversion team from Computacenter a worthwhile experience. Their knowledge of our requirements and the advantages we benefited from, as a result of their automated process, meant that the project ran smoothly. We were also able to access OS/390 specialists to assist in the project and to take on the responsibilities of running our complex middleware systems, throughout and beyond the conversion.”

He added: “A project completed on time and budget, which met all of our objectives.”