Helping a Food Processing Business with End-to-end AS400 System Documentation

A food processing company based in Indiana, with manufacturing plants in multiple US cities, was mulling over decommissioning its IBM AS400-based ERP for a modern alternative. The high daily transaction volumes, large customer base, complex workflows, widespread product varieties, and multi-tiered sales and supply channels made it a massive undertaking. As the client didn’t have their existing environment well-documented, meticulous documentation was a non-negotiable prerequisite to bringing order to the chaos and develop a sound approach for the migration.

The Challenge

The fact that documentation had to be done ground up, covering hundreds of modules, and processes, and sub-processes that involved numerous stakeholders, made it an overwhelming task.
The following factors added to the complexity.

The sheer number of modules to be covered, each comprising Data models, Jobs, Archives, Reports, Configurations, Workflows, Process Flows, and many more.
The huge (and mostly unstructured) data that piled up over a decade made Understand and document existing business functionality an onerous job

The Process

Nalashaa adopted a methodological approach and started off with a series of discussions with the executives and departmental heads to understand the objectives and motivations for the migration. The unavailability of proper documentation was the primary challenge the team was facing while supporting the machine. But a migration necessitated thorough documentation of the end-to-end process Nalashaa’s solutions team analyzed the existing documentation and prioritized the needs to map the data, shortlist workflows of interest, and identify dependencies and process gaps.
The following modules were zeroed in for the first phase of documentation.

Purchase Management	Cash Purchase Receipts Purchase Order Creation, Approval, and Dispatch Goods Receipt Creation Debit Note Creation Purchase Reporting Binding Contract Goods Delivery
Order Management	Order Entry Order Enquiry Pricing Reports Allocation – Batch/Manual Packing and Pickup Shipment
Inventory Management	Excess Inventory Inventory Shortages Dead Stock Inventory Turnover Warehouse Master Stock Tracking Inventory/Products history Cycle counting Vendor management
AR/AP Management	Customer Master and Invoice Record Accounts Receivable Ledger Accounts Receivable Aged Listing Customer Statements Invoice Dispute Management Individual Collection Letters Requisition and PO Creation PO authorization and sharing Invoice Receipt Invoice Approval Invoice Posting in the System Invoice Payment Supplier Reconciliation
Logistics Management	Inbound/Outbound Transportation Warehouse Management Fleet Management Third-party Service management Supply and Demand Driver’s Log Record Route Management

The Approach

Process Name and Boundaries: Each RPG process was assigned a suitable name, with its description and objective well-recorded.
Process Prioritization: To understand the functioning of the existing setup, all RPG processes were prioritized based on their business value.
Process Input/Output: The type, format, and source of the data fed into each process were recorded along with the nature of the output. All activities and steps to execute the processes in the AS400 system were tracked.

Stakeholders and Flowchart: Stakeholders and owners of all RPG processes were consulted for their inputs, and a detailed flowchart was created for easy comprehension.

For the ease of planning and execution, the documentation of the selected modules was split into three primary categories – Data, Business Process, and DevOps. Each process was assigned a suitable name, and its description was recorded along with its objective. To get a clear picture of the existing features, a top-down approach starting with the major component and drilling down into subsets of functionality was zeroed in on.
For each of the three categories, the team divided the documentation task into different categories, as listed in the table below.

Data Documentation

Data Sources	Relationships	Audit & Archiving	Reports
Data Source-Business process/Transaction mapping Structure, constraints, and business validations DML mappings per DS Frequency and transaction volume	Data Model assessment Core & reference entities Relationship and dependencies ETL, job manipulations with entity mappings	Alerts & audit events Archiving process jobs Recovery process & jobs Audit reports, actions, and alerts	Structure & frequency Canned and Ad hoc reports for business users Report subscriptions Report count rationalization

ETL	Extracts	Jobs
ETL f/w design & structure Data load process & Listing of business rules Audit, exceptions, notifications, etc. Timing, SLAs, stakeholder identification	Formats, standards, and data dependencies SQL based extracts Data extracts creation and distribution process Data dependency	Inventory scheduled jobs Job monitoring process & success/failure reporting Security expectations Frequency, Batching rules Audit/Exception logging

Business Process Documentation

Process Flow	Document Management	Integrations	Screens & Mappings
Process blueprinting Task flow (action level) Touchpoints and dependencies Boundary conditions and Exception management	Identify unstructured data formats Document structure, purpose, storage, and process Privilege rules and management Lifecycle and retirement	Integration inventory and mode Technological prerequisites Custom parsers/adapters Transform & target maps	Screen navigation Journey mapping with roles Inventory screen elements Validations & exceptions

DevOps

Roles and Permissions	Authorization	Configurations	Deployment	Change Management
Resource-Level Access & Subscriptions User Profile Information & Applications Dev, QA, UAT & Prod OUTQ and Third-party tools	Authorization List, User Roles, and Permissions Environment Roles Printer Admin Roles Third-party applications and their roles and permissions	Client, Servers, and Jobs APIs, TCP/IP , FTP & SFTP Customer Customizations Tools and Subscriptions Data Refresh Prod to QA	Objects Promotions and Process Application/Object Dependencies Continuous Integration Team Co-ordinations Application Failures	Version Control of Prod Artifacts Impact analysis Approval Board Implementation plan Review & reporting

*Additionally, to make maintenance of the system easy for the client’s team, we created an Object Flowchart that summarized all Business Rules within each program, allowing the teams to follow the flow of each program with a pictorial representation. A visual depiction of the interaction between objects helped the team understand how the system works. This also helped the new members to understand the system structure better.

Benefits

End-to-end system documentation helps the RPG team in system maintenance and updates.
The team is better equipped to address user queries with the necessary coding.
With processes and sub-processes well documented, the learning curve of new RPG team members is cut down significantly.
In the case of migration, comprehensive documentation helps ensure the replication of the processes and functionalities in the new system.
This is a good interim modernization option until the migration is executed successfully.

Technology Stack

How to start the journey?

To choose the right AS400 support for your business, we would like to understand your needs better. The form below is a great way to start that!

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