Industrial and distribution companies still rely on historical versions of their Infor ERP (Movex/M3), often hosted on IBM iSeries and enriched over time by a significant amount of RPG developments. These environments have long been reliable, robust, and suited to very specific needs. But today, they find themselves indiscrepancy with operational reality: globalized supply chains, traceability and compliance requirements, proliferation of satellite tools (EDI, WMS, TMS, e-commerce), acceleration of business cycles, and the rising stakes of data and cybersecurity.
The question is no longer “should we migrate?” but “when and with what strategy?”. For organizations whose IT systems still rely on a rigid and heavily customized foundation, time becomes critical.Postponing transformationrarely means “buying time”: more often, itincreases technical debt, reduces maneuvering margins, and makes future migration riskier.
Legacy RPG is no longer just an IT constraint: it is becoming a structural barrier.
RPG environments from the 1990s to 2000s were designed for closed architectures, poorly interconnected, with data models and operational practices very different from those expected today. However,ERP is not just another application: it is the corethat synchronizes purchasing, production, inventory, sales, finance, and management.When this core relies on end-of-cycle technology, the entire company becomes fragile.
In practice, the same symptoms reappear:complex maintenance, long and risky evolutions,difficulty in proper testing, sometimes incomplete documentation, dependence on historical habits and “tacit knowledge.” As the organization changes (new sites, new channels, new customer requirements),legacy becomes less a foundation than a bottleneck..
The skills shortage turns maintenance into an operational risk.
One of the most tangible signals concerns skills.The pool of RPG experts is shrinking,, experienced profiles are gradually leaving, and renewal is difficult. As a result: what was “manageable” when the company had a stable internal team becomes a source of exposure.
The risk is not only budgetary(costs of rare experts).It is also organizational.: dependence on one or two people, difficulty securing a succession plan, reduced capacity to absorb a crisis (breakdown, production incident, security breach). In some contexts, business continuity can be jeopardized by a simple human event (departure, prolonged unavailability) or technical issue (material incident, incompatibility, obsolescence).
Customizations, once a competitive advantage, become a trap.
In many companies, legacy RPG is 'custom-made'.. Initially, these developments responded to a rational logic: covering business needs absent from the standard, accelerating certain operations, or adapting the ERP to very specific practices.
Over time, these layers of customizations often end up producing the opposite effect. :
- They significantly increase maintenance costs,
- they make the company vulnerable to 'domino' effects (a minor change leads to unexpected regressions).
- They make the architecture rigid,
- they complicate every version upgrade,
- they create dependencies that are difficult to audit,
The key point is that a large part of these 'specs' no longer has the same justification today.Modern cloud solutions(like Infor CloudSuite) offerstandardized and configurable industry processes, oftencapable of replacing a large part of historical developments, provided that serious rationalization work is carried out: distinguishing what is truly differentiating for the business from what has become a workaround or a habit., à condition de mener un travail sérieux de rationalisation : distinguer ce qui relève du réel différenciant métier, de ce qui est devenu un contournement ou une habitude.
Obsolescence is not just about ERP: the entire ecosystem is aging
Staying on an RPG foundation often impliesretaining, out of necessity, an entire legacy technical environment: outdated IBM i OS version, dated DB2, aging development and monitoring tools, hardware dependencies, proprietary interfaces, non-standardized integration mechanisms. This accumulation creates a form oftechnological isolation.
As the company adopts newtools(e-commerce platforms, transport solutions, planning tools, CRM, BI, automation),the legacy must be "bridged" by specific developments.These interfaces stack up, points of fragility multiply, and thecompatibility with modern standards becomes increasingly costly to maintain.
From a security standpoint, this isolation is particularly problematic: update requirements, segmentation, traceability, hardening, IAM integration, actionable logs… all elements that become difficult to achieve with an information system built on old bricks.
The "cost of doing nothing" is almost always underestimated
Many organizations still consider that a migration "costs too much" and that keeping the current system is a more prudent choice. In reality,the status quo has an increasing cost, sometimes invisible as it is spread across multiple budgets: maintenance of rare skills, repetitive specific projects, patches, instabilities, over-quality needed to secure changes, integration delays, slow delivery, operational risks.
In other words: staying in legacy does not mean 'zero projects'. It often means 'aseries of corrective and specific projects', which consume budgetwithout truly modernizingthe company's ability to evolve.
The real cost is not just financial. It also translates into lost opportunities: difficulty in quickly launching a new offering, industrializing data, ensuring supply chain visibility, automating, improving user experience, deploying features consistently across multiple sites.
The cloud brings a paradigm shift, not just a simple update.
Migrating to a modern cloud solution like Infor CloudSuite is not just about changing versions. It isshifting from a 'maintain and repair' model to a 'continuously evolve' model, with an architecture designed for integration, availability, analytics, and security.
Specifically, a modern cloud platform provides:
- continuous updates (evergreen logic),
- more robust governance (data, security, traceability).
- a solid foundation for automation and AI use,
- integrated and industrializable analytical capabilities,
- integration tools and standardized APIs,
- resilience and availability at an industrial scale,
These benefits are not 'accessory'. They condition theability to remain competitivein an environment where thedecision-making and execution cycles are accelerating, and where the application ecosystem is rapidly enriching.
The longer we wait, the more complex the migration becomes (and the less choice we have)
Each year spent on an RPG version generally adds layers: new workarounds, ad hoc patches, additional interfaces, scripts, implicit dependencies, business logic encapsulated in undocumented code.Technical debt thickensand migration gradually transforms: from a manageable structuring project, it can become animposed emergency projectdue to an incident, a skills gap, a vendor constraint, or a security imperative.
In this context,migrating early does not mean “rushing”. It meansregaining control: planning, prioritizing, spreading the effort, securing the trajectory, deciding what should be retained, restructured, or standardized.
Migrating proactively allows us to turn constraints into leverage
A well-managed migration project is also an opportunity forsimplification. It’s the time to:
- rationalizeprocesses (and clarify exceptions),
- preparethe organization for a continuous update logic.
- improvecompliance and cybersecurity,
- standardizethe interfacing with the ecosystem,
- removeunnecessary customizations,
- modernizethe data model,
Companies thatanticipategenerally achieve abetter ROI, not only through cost reduction, but because theyavoid the typical pitfalls of constrained migrations: impossible deadlines, forced trade-offs, corrective cost overruns, uncontrolled dependencies.
In conclusion, migrating to the cloud is no longer a luxury, it is a condition of continuity
For organizations still on legacy RPG versions, migrating to a modern cloud solution like Infor CloudSuite is increasingly less of an “IT choice” and more of anecessity for continuity: continuity of skills, continuity of support, continuity of security, and operational continuity.
The sooner the transition is initiated, the more the company can manage it as a controlled transformation: with a clear budget trajectory, a gradual reduction of risks, and a tangible modernization of business capabilities.Waiting, on the other hand, often means letting complexity decide for you.