Archiving JBA ERP: A Practical Guide to Decommissioning Legacy Systems

For many enterprises, JBA ERP is like an old machine running quietly in the basement- rarely touched, barely understood, yet impossible to switch off. It holds decades of financials, orders, inventory movements, and operational breadcrumbs your business still depends on.

Storing legacy data in those systems is hard. Maintaining them is even harder. Data retrieval and governance are a great concern for organizations that still use legacy applications for storing data.

Modernization is no longer ‘nice to have’ for legacy systems. Nearly 76% of businesses have already moved or are actively migrating their on-premises ERP systems to the cloud.

But as modernization grows and data volumes surge, these reliable JBA ERP systems have become heavy, expensive, and difficult to maintain.

That’s why enterprises are retiring JBA ERP systems, primarily because the risks and costs of maintaining the aging, on-premises technology outweigh the pros of modern, agile, cloud-based solutions.

JBA Technical Architecture: How the Legacy System Is Structured

The JBA ERP system, originally developed by JBA International, is an enterprise resource planning platform now known as Infor System21. It is a mature, highly functional software solution based on the robust IBM i platform, designed to help organizations manage core business processes.

The product is now part of the Infor suite of business software products and is referred to as Infor System21. Below is a quick breakdown of how the system is structured:

• Platform Foundation: Runs on IBM AS/400 (iSeries) using RPG and COBOL programs, powered by a DB2/400 database and a terminal-style menu UI.
• Modular Architecture: Organized into subsystems like Financials, Manufacturing, Distribution, Inventory, Procurement, and Sales, tightly integrated internally but dependent on custom connectors for external systems.
• Data Structures: Uses Physical Files (PF) for core tables, Logical Files (LF) for predefined views, and numerous temporary work files for batch processes.
• Processing Model: Relies heavily on overnight batch runs and sequential processing, which slows down analytics and real-time data needs.
• Integration Approach: Exchanges data via flat files, EDI interfaces, and custom connectors, with very limited API capabilities.
• Security Framework: Based on AS/400’s strong security model; role-based permissions, object-level access, and native auditing.

Why Archiving JBA ERP Is Complex, and what are the Risks posed

Keeping historical data inside JBA ERP may seem like the simplest way to preserve data access, but the reality is far more complicated. JBA was never designed to function as a long-term archival system. Its rigid file structures, proprietary formats, and aging AS/400 foundation make data retention increasingly fragile and resource-intensive.

As transaction volume grows, so do the challenges: slower performance, more complex maintenance, and the constant struggle to interpret decades-old customizations and undocumented tables.

What are the Challenges of Storing Data in JBA ERP?

Complex and Customized Data Structures: Every JBA environment is heavily customized, resulting in unique tables, relationships, and logic. This makes it difficult to map, extract, and reconstruct complete historical data accurately.

Legacy Platform and Obsolete Expertise: JBA runs on AS/400 using RPG and CL languages that very few experts understand today. The limited expertise makes extraction, troubleshooting, and validation slower and riskier.

Proprietary Data Formats and Encoding: JBA stores data in DB2/400 flat files using EBCDIC, packed decimal data types, and proprietary record layouts. These formats require special conversion logic to make the data usable in modern systems.

Lack of Documentation: Most implementations lack table definitions, field-level descriptions, and process documentation. Experts must reverse-engineer structures and dependencies, which are time-consuming and complex.

Data Volume and Performance Impact: JBA often holds 10 to 30 plus years of transactional and operational data across modules. Extracting large volumes can strain the system, slow batch processes, or cause outages.

Maintaining Accessibility and Compliance: Historical accuracy must be preserved across modules, relationships, audit trails, and financial logic. Ensuring compliance-ready access outside the legacy system requires careful mapping and validation.

Multilingual Data: JBA environments often store data in multiple languages and character sets. Converting these exactly to modern formats adds another layer of complexity.

With these challenges, enterprises prefer migrating and decommissioning JBA systems. Only the right archival platform can simplify data retention and compliance.

Are There Any Risks of Continuing JBA as an Archival System?

Relying on JBA to store archived data exposes your organization to significant operational, financial, and compliance risks. Understanding these risks is essential before deciding whether to keep JBA alive solely for historical reference or move toward a modern archival platforms.

Operational and Performance Risks

Running JBA only for historical data forces you to maintain the entire AS/400 infrastructure like hardware, OS, patches, and integrations. Any failure, downtime, or corruption becomes a single point of operational risk affecting the overall system.

Financial and Cost Risks

Licensing, hardware, maintenance contracts, and niche talent make JBA expensive to sustain. Costs rise every year as resources become scarce and support ecosystems shrink.

Compliance and Security Risks

Compliance mandates require structured retention, defensible deletion, monitoring, and audit trails – features that JBA lacks. Legacy security models also struggle to meet modern data protection standards and cybersecurity expectations.

Will JBA ERP modernization solve the above challenges and reduce risks?

JBA ERP modernization approaches do not resolve the core legacy limitations; instead, they come up with substantial risks. So, enterprises using JBA ERP systems choose to migrate and archive their data to a new archival platform.

Let’s compare JBA ERP with modern archival platforms:

How to Migrate and Archive JBA ERP Data Effectively?

Migrating and archiving JBA ERP data is not a simple export; it requires handling AS/400 file structures, proprietary PF/LF formats, and decades of customizations. The goal is to move historical data into a modern archival platform where it remains searchable, compliant, and accessible long after JBA is retired.

1. Assess JBA Data Structures

Start by identifying all physical files (PF), logical files (LF), custom tables, and EBCDIC-encoded fields. Understanding these structures upfront prevents gaps during extraction

2. Extract All JBA Files to Modern Formats

Perform a full-system export of every data object. Convert files into formats suitable for archival platforms, such as:

• CSV
• Flat files (fixed width)
• XML or JSON (if structured metadata is needed)

During extraction, convert EBCDIC to UTF-8, preserve field lengths, numeric precision, and date formats. Then capture metadata like timestamps, relations, and audit logs.

3. Clean and Normalize the Data

Standardize date formats, fix encoding issues, flatten logical file structures, and prepare data for long-term storage and searchability.

4. Validate Before Archival

Verify row counts, relationships, numeric fields, and multilingual accuracy to ensure complete and defensible datasets.

5. Load Into a Modern Archival Platform

Ingest all cleaned files into an archival system that leverages:

• Bulk ingestion pipelines
• Automated indexing
• Metadata tagging
• Searchable structures for historical reporting

Once ingested, the archive becomes the authoritative source for all JBA historical data.

6. Apply Retention and Compliance Policies

Configure automated retention, legal holds, audit trails, and role-based access – capabilities JBA cannot support natively. After data migration, what happens to the legacy JBA ERP system running in AS/400 environments?

You can carefully sunset the JBA ERP application from the AS/400 environment without disrupting business operations. As data becomes old, it is automatically migrated to the archival platform until it is secure and compliant.

Further reading: The Complete Guide to AS400 Migration and Modernization

How to Decommission JBA ERP After Migration?

Once all JBA historical data has been fully migrated and archived, the next step is to safely and securely decommission the legacy  system. Sunsetting the application eliminates the operational burden of AS/400 environments functioning for various business needs. Below is a practical approach to retiring JBA responsibly.

Step 1: Freeze All JBA Activities

Lock the system to ensure no new transactions, updates, or modified records occur during or after migration. This avoids discrepancies between the archived environment and the retired system.

Step 2: Extract and Preserve System Metadata

Before shutting down JBA, archive:

• Program objects (RPG, COBOL)
• Job and batch logs
• Menu structures and user roles
• Parameter files and configuration settings
• Interface definitions and custom workflows

This metadata supports future debugging, traceability, and audit inquiries even when the system is offline.

Step 3: Validate Access via the Archive

Ensure that everything previously accessible in JBA can now be retrieved from the archival platform. Historical transactions, inventory, sales, financial records, custom reports, multilingual data, and logical file relationships or reconstructed views.

If this validation succeeds, JBA no longer needs to remain operational.

Step 4: Sunset JBA ERP Application

Publicly declare the retiring activity and perform the official technical retirement:

• Remove JBA libraries
• Revoke user access and credentials
• Capture a final snapshot or system image for extreme long-term retention

This marks the actual end of the JBA environment.

Ensuring Compliance & Auditability After JBA Decommissioning

Even after JBA is taken offline, businesses must still meet ongoing governance and regulatory obligations. This includes responding to financial audits, generating historical reports, demonstrating data lineage, complying with statutory retention and privacy laws, and supporting investigations or legal discovery.

Retiring the application does not eliminate these mandates, and access to historical JBA data remains essential.

After classifying and profiling the historical data, organizations must ensure they choose an archival platform that fully complies with regulatory requirements and provides the necessary capabilities:

• time-stamped audit trails
• searchable access to all JBA records
• role-based access controls
• immutable storage
• defensible deletion after retention periods
• ability to reconstruct historical reporting views

These archival features reassure that even though JBA is decommissioned, compliance, auditability, and accessibility remain intact.

Recommended read – IBM Content Manager OnDemand (CMOD): Migration, Archiving and End-of-Life Planning Guide

Cost, Security, and Operational Benefits of Decommissioning JBA ERP

Decommissioning JBA ERP delivers impactful benefits:

Cost Benefits 

• Ends software licensing and annual support fees
• Reduces dependency on expensive RPG/COBOL specialists
• Cuts energy, storage, and data center overhead

Security Benefits 

• Removes outdated operating systems and unpatched legacy components
• Reduces attack surface by retiring a vulnerable platform
• Ensures data is stored in a modern, encrypted, monitored environment

Operational Benefits 

• Free from application failures, system freezes, or operational risks
• Centralized access to historical records
• Improved performance for audits and data retrieval
• Simplified IT landscape with fewer legacy dependencies

Overall, decommissioning JBA strengthens an organization’s risk posture while lowering the total cost of ownership.

Data Accessibility After Decommissioning: What Businesses Still Need

Even after JBA is retired, enterprises still need quick access to historical financial, operational, and transactional data. Also, be able to recreate JBA reports for audits or reconciliations, and support cross-year comparisons for budgeting and forecasting.

Furthermore, businesses need access to master data history, such as suppliers, SKUs, pricing, and customers, and the supporting metadata context, including code lists, lookup tables, and configuration logic.

The new archival platform should deliver:

• Fast search and filtering
• Record-level and document-level access
• Ability to open, view, or export data without JBA
• Context-preserving metadata for interpretation

This ensures that users can work confidently without relying on the legacy application.

How Archon Helps Archive and Fully Retire the Legacy JBA ERP System

Archon provides an end-to-end framework for the data archival and retrieval process: Archon Analyzer, Archon ETL, and Archon Data Store (ADS). Archon is purpose-built for migrating complex legacy ERPs like JBA ERP.

Instead of modernization or partial extraction attempts, Archon enables a clean, archival migration while ensuring all historical JBA context, relationships, and auditability remain intact long after the system is shut down.

Purpose-Built for Legacy ERP Archival

Archon is engineered specifically for legacy ERP decommissioning, making it uniquely capable of handling JBA’s deeply intertwined AS/400, DB2, and proprietary file structures.

How Archon products help:

• Archon Analyzer scans the JBA environment, identifies all tables, logical files, physical files, indexes, and custom objects, and maps dependencies across modules.
• Archon ETL automatically extracts data from AS/400/DB2, including multi-member physical files, logical file joins, and JBA-specific encodings.
• Archon Data Store (ADS) stores the extracted data in a cloud-native, immutable, compliant archival database.

The purpose?

• Acts as native connectors for legacy ERPs like JBA.
• Handles complex AS/400 record layouts and field-level encoding without manual reconstruction.
• Preserves historical context, module relationships, and audit trails, so data remains meaningful and trustworthy for years.

How Archon Data Stores Makes Archived JBA Data Readily Usable

Once migrated, Archon Data Store (ADS) turns static historical JBA data into a usable, searchable, audit-friendly system.

How can Archon help?

• Archon ETL ensures all JBA modules (Finance, Inventory, Sales, Purchasing, MRP) are extracted with referential integrity intact.
• Archon Analyzer transforms JBA’s buried codes and workflows into structured, navigable metadata inside the archive UI.
• ADS indexes every record for fast retrieval and deep drill-down.

What this means for your data:

• Facilitates real-time search across decades of JBA modules.
• Drill-down views that replicate the structure and logic of legacy JBA screens.
• Instant export of reports for tax audits, compliance reviews, internal controls, or legal investigations.
• Full data lineage preserved from source file, library, and member to final archival structure, ensuring traceability.

How Archon Retires and Decommissions Legacy JBA Safely

The final step is retiring the JBA environment without breaking downstream processes or losing access to critical historical information.

How Archon products help:

• Archon Analyzer confirms the extraction is complete and then validates module-level coverage before shutdown.
• Archon ETL ensures data is migrated, normalized, and reconciled.
• ADS becomes the authoritative system of record for all historical JBA data.

Why does it matter?

• Complete elimination of JBA modules, reducing infrastructure, licensing, and maintenance costs.
• Ensures nothing disrupts downstream – compliance reports, references, audit needs, and financial histories remain accessible.
• Maintains an immutable, compliant, low-cost cloud archive that supports long-term retention laws.
• Provides Day-2 operational support, enabling business teams to continue accessing archived JBA data without IT involvement.

System retires, Value Remains

Decommissioning JBA ERP is a strategic move that unlocks significant cost savings, strengthens security, and ensures long-term compliance. By retiring outdated JBA infrastructure, enterprises eliminate the mounting risks, licensing costs, and skill shortages associated with maintaining a legacy system that no longer serves modern business needs.

Archived with Archon Data Store – What Happens to Your Data? Secure, compliant, and preserved with complete integrity.

Data Retrieval?  Searchable and fully auditable.

Data Analysis?  Audit-ready, analytics-friendly, and built for long-term insight.

Ready to archive JBA ERP data without losing its value? Reach our experts