Industry: Medical Technology & Healthcare Manufacturing
Use Case: IBM AS/400 (iSeries) Decommissioning, JBA Financial Archival
Product: Archon Data Store™ , Archon ETL™
The Situation: A Legacy Financial System Nobody Wanted To Replace
The customer is one of the largest medical device companies in the world by revenue; a global developer and manufacturer of healthcare technologies and therapies used across hospitals and clinical settings worldwide. Buried inside its finance function sat a heavily customized Info JBA financial application, running on IBM i-series (AS/400) servers that had been in continuous operation for decades.
The system held over 2 terabytes of financial records: general ledger, AP/AR, cost accounting, and audit history tied to a global manufacturing and distribution business. It worked. But it worked the way legacy systems often do quietly, on aging hardware, understood in full by almost no one left in the organization.
The Challenge: One Retiring Employee Away from an Operational Crisis
The real risk wasn’t the hardware age alone, it was the knowledge gap sitting on top of it. Info JBA on AS/400 had been modified so extensively over the years that the customizations were effectively undocumented outside of institutional memory. That created three compounding problems:
- Key-person risk: a shrinking pool of staff still knew how to query and interpret JBA data on the green-screen AS/400 interface, some of it tied to a single remaining specialist.
- Rising carrying cost: maintaining legacy IBM i hardware, OS licensing, and specialized support contracts kept consuming budget for a system that produced no new business value.
- Cloud strategy blocker: the enterprise had an active mandate to reduce on-premise legacy footprint and shift toward cloud-first infrastructure, and the AS/400 estate was the most stubborn holdout.
“Archiving the transactions without moving the content creates orphaned records. Moving the content without validated links creates an audit gap. Both had to happen together.”
— Archon AS/400 Decommissioning Team
What Archon Did: Automated Mapping, Encrypted Archival, and a Modern Query Layer
Using Archon Data Store and Archon’s IBM AS/400 domain expertise, the team ran its repeatable decommissioning methodology end-to-end, built specifically to handle heavily modified legacy financial systems:
- Automated entity-relationship mapping: data analysis tooling reverse-engineered the structure of the customized JBA schema, rebuilding the relationships between ledgers, transactions, and supporting documents without relying on tribal knowledge.
- Auto-configured archive setup: the extracted schema knowledge was used to automatically stand up the target archive system, cutting the manual configuration time typical of legacy mainframe migrations.
- Extraction, retention analysis, and encrypted load: financial data was extracted, evaluated against retention and compliance requirements, and loaded into Archon Data Store in encrypted format end to end.
- Modern query screens: Archon built and curated new search and query interfaces, giving finance and audit teams faster, more intuitive access to historical JBA data than the original AS/400 green screen ever offered.
THE RESULTS
| Record Type | Retention Standard | Governing Provision |
|---|---|---|
| General regulatory records | At least five years from the date the record was created, unless a different period applies | CFTC Reg. 1.31 |
| Written pre-trade communications under Reg. 1.35 | Five years | CFTC Reg. 1.35 |
| Oral communications subject to Reg. 1.35 | One year | CFTC Reg. 1.35 and related provisions of Reg. 1.31 |
| Specified pre-execution communications under Part 23 | Five years from the date the communication was created | CFTC Reg. 1.31 and Reg. 23.202 |
| Swap transaction and related records subject to the life-of-transaction rule | Through termination, maturity, expiration, transfer, assignment, or novation, plus five years | CFTC Reg. 1.31 and Reg. 23.203 |
| Specified oral communications under Part 23 | One year | CFTC Reg. 1.31 and Reg. 23.203 |
| Paper-only regulatory records | Readily accessible for at least two years | CFTC Reg. 1.31 |
| Electronic regulatory records | Readily accessible for the duration of the required retention period | CFTC Reg. 1.31 |
Why It Matters
AS/400 decommissioning projects usually fail for one of two reasons: the customizations on top of the base application are too poorly documented to map safely, or the archive that replaces the legacy system is harder to query than the system it replaced. This engagement solved both; automated relationship mapping made a heavily modified JBA environment safe to retire, and the resulting archive is easier to search than the AS/400 it replaced ever was.
For a global medical technology leader operating under strict regulatory and audit expectations, that combination: full data fidelity, zero downtime, and a defensible chain of custody for every financial record, is what turns a legacy retirement from a risk into a cloud-readiness milestone.
