Case Study: Cooper Farms achieves modernized development and efficiency gains with OpenText Visual COBOL

Move from RM/COBOL to Visual COBOL delivers modern development toolset delivering efficiency gains

Cooper Farms, a vertically integrated agriculture and food-processing company in Ohio, relied on a heavily customized, business-critical accounting system originating in the 1980s (2,200 programs, 1.7M LOC) that had been running on RM/COBOL since the 1990s. With about 50 daily and 200 occasional users, Cooper sought to modernize its development environment—to preserve decades of business logic while attracting new talent, improving developer productivity, and enabling future GUI and integration improvements.

Working with Micro Focus Professional Services, Cooper Farms converted all 2,200 programs to Visual COBOL and rebuilt code in Visual Studio, completing the upgrade in four months with no disruption to end users. The move gave the six-person development team better debugging and tooling, inspired web-application work, and set the stage for a shift to SQL databases and broader application integration—delivering measurable efficiency gains and a clear modernization path.

Cooper Farms

Jose Faller

Director of Technology