# Modernization without compromise Delivering continuous modernization for retail ## Out of stock and out of road? Retailers must move fast to keep up with evolving customer expectations, AI-driven personalization, and real-time supply chain optimization. But decades-old systems, rigid architectures, and undocumented business logic make changes risky, expensive, and painfully slow. ## Recreate and Deliver Based on our learnings, we build a perfect replica of this component in a secure cloud environment where it’s subject to rigorous performance and functional criteria before it goes live. Now this component is modern, tested, instrumented and well understood. Most importantly, it’s ready for innovation—while running smoothly with the rest of the legacy system. ## Repeat and Innovate The process iterates with the next component until the entire system has deployed into the cloud environment. Each subsequent component could take progressively less time through applying our AI tools and organizational learnings. Because we only work with a single component at a time, each one has a proven fallback method. This profoundly limits the risk to your living, breathing system at any given time. ## End the cycle, own the future Mechanical Orchard transforms your aging retail systems into modern, cloud-native applications without disruption. Our incremental but speedy process helps retailers move faster, and avoids the uncertainties and failures of traditional modernization approaches. ## About Imogen® The conventional modernization model relies on large teams, a patchwork of vendor tools, some of which use AI, and a sequence of phases — analysis, code transpilation, then a long, uncertain stretch of integration and regression testing. After what are often years of effort, success hinges on a single, high-stakes moment to see if everything actually works. Most of the time, it doesn't. Instead of focusing on code, Imogen captures how individual workloads actually behave — through real data flows — and rewrites that behavior into modern code. By creating a rapid loop of generation and validation against actual production data as each workload is rewritten, Imogen eliminates the long, uncertain integration phase that has defined — and derailed — conventional modernization efforts. Rather than applying generative AI directly to code translation, Imogen first builds a precise behavioral specification from the running system, then applies a closed loop of rapid code generation and verification against those specifications. The result is software that is audit-quality, idiomatic, and genuinely ready for what comes next — not just syntactically modern. While the methodology works for any legacy system, our data capture technology is optimized to automate the modernization process for the following mainframe technologies: - OL - Easytrieve - PL/1 - Assembler - CICS - IMS - ISAM - IDMS DB - DB2 - VSAM - IDMS ADS In retail, we have also worked with customers with a variety of other legacy systems, including Domino and 4GLs (fourth generation languages) like PowerBuilder. ## Our insights ### The Mechanical Orchard approach reduces risks The Mechanical Orchard engagement approach is designed to reduce risk and demonstrate meaningful progress at every step. ## The Exploratory Workshop What is the most critical business application? What's connected to it? ## The Pilot - Can it be done? What will it take? Build initial roadmap ## The Steel Thread Get to production, Address risk early, Validate the approach ## Accelerate - Tune for speed, Clear remaining risks, Tackle remaining mass, Make future change easy 1. **Exploratory Workshop** In the Exploratory Workshop, we will learn about you, your business, and your biggest pain points when it comes to your legacy system. The goal is to understand the most impactful path forward to show success early and often. Together, we’ll identify the best starting point for modernizing—it could be a system component or a single workflow. We’ll gather the information we need to identify the top risks associated with modernizing this particular component and get a sense of the degree of complexity. The workshop is free and lasts between 2-3 hours. Afterwards, we’ll deliver a detailed estimate of the effort involved for the next stage and propose a roadmap for moving forward. "During our exploratory workshop, Mechanical Orchard identified, inventoried, and ranked current and potential future risks of the system, along with recommended strategies for mitigation in the modernization process." — CIO, Local Government 2. **Pilot** The goal of the Pilot is to deliver the component or workflow selected in the Exploratory Workshop as working software in a test environment. As part of this, we’ll interview key stakeholders, review documentation and user manuals, and use various tools to get a deep understanding of the system, its behavior, and its context. Based on our learnings, we build a replica of the component or workflow in a secure cloud environment, test it and ensure it performs exactly as it does in your legacy environment. This gives us a concrete understanding of how much time and effort it will take to modernize this component in the production environment—and a better estimate of the time and effort to modernize the entire system—and it surfaces anything that might pose a risk to successful migration. "Mechanical Orchard began by analyzing all the data flows through a single, critical system component, then precisely replicated its behavior in a cloud-based test environment with perfect fidelity. That’s a powerful proof point." — CIO, Global Logistics and Transportation Company 3. **Steel Thread** In the Steel Thread phase, we’ll deliver the selected component or workflow into production—only after all of us are confident it’s performing well enough to cut over into the cloud. This cloud environment is fully provisioned and secure to your specifications, and works hand-in-hand with the legacy environment to minimize disruption. With this one, modernized workflow in the cloud, you’re able to see it performing with the rest of your system. Through this effort, we’ve surfaced the majority of issues and risks and can begin to pave and accelerate the path forward for the rest of the system based on real, learned experience. "Mechanical Orchard’s team made quick work of dissecting our legacy systems, core business processes, and charted a course for our future technology. Their disciplined approach to solving ‘the hard problems’ in software engineering is unparalleled in the industry, and delivered results from day one." — VP, Software Engineering, Global Logistics Company 4. **Accelerate and Innovate** By the Accelerate and Innovate phase, all major risks have been identified and addressed. At this point, we tackle the remaining mass of the overall system, continually tuning for speed. Our Pollux equivalence monitoring system ensures that each incremental component meets or exceeds existing performance and functional requirements before it’s deployed into the cloud. "You have gone further than any modernization effort we’ve ever experienced." — CIO, F500 Global Retailer ## Your new legacy starts here. We believe that every company deserves to realize their vision, free of constraints from the past. Our team's technology, and experience can help them move into this evolving version safely, reliably, fearlessly.