The Bridge, Not the Burn: Why we told a manufacturer not to migrate their AS/400. Not yet.

This is not the advice most consultants give.

The manufacturer had been running their AS/400 for ERP for over 20 years. Good system. Reliable. Well understood by the people operating it.

They'd been told, more than once, it was time to replace it. New ERP. Modern platform. 18-month migration. Significant investment.

They weren't ready for that - operationally or financially.

And they didn't need to be.

What they actually needed was for their new web applications to talk to the AS/400. That was the real problem. Not the AS/400 itself.

So that's what we addressed. A REST API wrapper around the existing system. Modern applications could now integrate with it immediately. The full migration - still planned, still the right long-term move - got pushed to a proper timeline. Funded correctly. Sequenced properly. Not forced.

We worked alongside the manufacturer's own IT team throughout - they knew the AS/400, we knew the architecture of what needed to connect to it. One of our team built the API layer. Another worked through the integration requirements.

That combination tends to produce better outcomes than either side working alone.

Which is the point.