(July 2019)
MOST successfully moved the Provident Funds system from Israel's Bank Hapoalim to production at Malam-Team.
This was the peak of an intensive and complex two-year project which was described by some as an "open heart surgery".
The beginning was Bank Hapoalim's strategic business decision to sell its Provident Funds system and its entire operation to Malam-Team, Israel's largest computer services company. Residing on mainframe and open system environments, the system consists of a complex set of financial applications serving more than 10 different investment companies and millions of customers.
Based on its long history of proven track record MOST was nominated to handle the conversion, migration, and integration of the systems.
The objective of the project was to re-host the existing system using "lift & shift" approach and migrate the data from Bank Hapoalim to Malam-Team while making minimal changes to the software and ensuring continued business stability to the customers.
Major challenges of the project
This high profile project carried a unique challenge since the provident fund system is completely interwoven with the bank's internal systems and used many of the bank's proprietary tools and utilities that could not be moved over. These tools and utilities had to be redeveloped and had to yield the same results as in the Bank.
Other challenges were:
Extracting the software and infrastructure from the existing intricate bank infrastructure
Handling bank-wide systems that supported funds along with other bank functionality
Moving the existing systems to platforms that are technologically different from those of the bank
Changing the entire identification management infrastructure
Upgrading the systems to more advanced versions of the software
Installing a system that worked with multiple IT disciplines
A big- bang go-live for 2700 users and trillions of dollars in portfolio
Technologies:
The Provident Funds system required the implementation of a mixture of technologies:
Approximately 20 systems coded in COBOL, Java, C# .NET, Cognos, Datastage and more.
DB2 mainframe, VSAM, SQL Server, Microsoft Reporting Services, DB2 on an open platform, .Net, & Cache databases
Infrastructure: IBM Websphere, NDM, Windows Servers, VMware, F5, Citrix, Datastage and more.
Thousands of end-users across more than 15 different financial companies
Real-time Interfaces with data providers, government institutes, clearinghouses and banks
Implementation approach
As indicated above MOST's approach for implementation was to perform a "lift & shift" operation wherever possible. Other components which could not be moved over had to be developed or replaced by various tools. Other activities included software versions upgrades (e.g. Java and COBOL were upgraded to the latest versions) and changes to business processes because the system was taken out from the Bank's system to be executed by a non-financial organization. MOST's OnTarget tool suite was used to perform automated adaption of COBOL code and JCL where relevant.
The project completed successfully in two years.