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# Automotive Customer Story — 7 days to map a 30-year mainframe **Industry:** Automotive **Cloud:** Multi-Cloud **Outcome:** 7 days to map a 30-year mainframe ## Summary A 30-year-old automotive COBOL mainframe, 11,238 artifacts from source code alone, analysed in seven days by one engineer with CHAI, then a slice migrated. ## The Challenge A global, multi-brand automotive group runs its group-wide logistics on a single mainframe platform. More than 30 plants depend on it, and it has run on IBM z/OS for more than 30 years: 1,097 COBOL programs, four IMS hierarchical databases, 3270 terminal interfaces, and 33 external system integrations.The group wanted off the mainframe without a big-bang rewrite, which meant finding where the estate splits. The conditions made that hard. The engagement started with source code and nothing else: no documentation, no dependency maps, and code that called external systems that were not part of the drop. Program names, comments, and screens were all in German. And there was no test environment and no production data to run or compare against. ## The Solution One engineer ran the whole engagement with CHAI™. Discovery came before any code moved: CHAI mapped the estate, found where it splits, checked its own findings, and only then migrated a real slice.Discover. CHAI mapped every dependency, database access pattern, and external integration it could find across all 11,238 artifacts, German-language code included. Calls to systems outside the drop were traced to the interface and recorded.Split. The 1,097 programs fell into four independent domains, with only 18 cross-domain calls between them and no circular dependencies, so each domain can move on its own schedule.Verify. CHAI's first pass treated one domain as IMS-only. Its own cross-check found 155+ SQL statements there and corrected the plan. The same review found 14 more programs, 6 unmapped integrations, and a misidentified UI technology.Migrate. CHAI delivered a Spring Boot microservice covering the slice's database, APIs, event streaming, and batch jobs, plus a 25-task developer-ready plan (~17–25.5 hours) with source traceability and verification criteria for every task. ## The Outcome The whole estate was analysed in seven days against six to eight weeks for manual analysis, by one engineer. The analysis and the eight-program migration together cost about $200.On the proof-of-concept slice, roughly 18,000 lines of COBOL became about 1,400 lines of Java 21 — a 13:1 code reduction. Four IMS databases were consolidated into one PostgreSQL schema, 3270 screens were replaced by 14 REST APIs and Kafka events, all 76 DL/I calls moved to a repository pattern, and a slice that had no automated tests now has 151.The recommended path is a phased, 18-month migration using the Strangler Fig pattern: old and new run side by side, one domain at a time, lowest risk first, with no big-bang cutover and rollback in under a minute at every phase. A phase advances only when eight validation gates pass. ## Stack - IBM z/OS - COBOL - IMS - Java 21 - Spring Boot - PostgreSQL - Apache Kafka - Kubernetes - CHAI ## Contact Book a demo: /contact/ Email: hello@cloudhedge.io