Case Study: Major Housing Authority Company achieves on-demand, secure mainframe-to-Excel reporting with Arbutus Software (LegacyLink)

Using LegacyLink to Get Mainframe Data into Windows at a Government Agency

Major Housing Authority Company struggled to give executives and staff timely, department-specific access to mainframe data on their Windows notebooks and desktops. The existing process (spooling, downloading, ASCII conversion and manual alignment/scrubbing by IT) created delays, stale reports and security/workflow issues. Arbutus Software was engaged to address these challenges using its LegacyLink™ product.

Arbutus Software implemented LegacyLink™ to read mainframe spool files, define reusable table mappings, and create Excel spreadsheets with live data links that refresh on open. The solution let end-users generate on-demand, department-specific reports without IT intervention, effectively eliminating the IT bottleneck and dramatically improving workflow while preserving read-only mainframe security. Phase Two will remove the spool-file step entirely, enabling direct, secure data reads from the source.