Case Study: Department for Work and Pensions achieves 60% faster batch processing, 75% faster deployments and nearly £150M savings with OpenText

Supporting citizens in need with Micro Focus and Advanced: ‘like for like’ digital transformation exceeds expectations and instead delivers ‘like for much better’

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is the UK’s largest public service department, supporting 20 million citizens and operating critical benefits systems on aging ICL mainframe COBOL code. The legacy platform constrained flexibility and innovation—nightly batch windows grew, releases were limited to two major updates a year, and a backlog of change requests made it hard to respond quickly to policy changes or crises.

DWP re‑platformed in phases using Micro Focus Visual COBOL and COBOL Server on AWS with partner Advanced, converting 25 million lines of code and nearly 11 billion data rows. The modernization cut batch times dramatically (e.g., 90→<15 minutes for Housing Benefit), improved JSAPS batch performance by 60% and reduced interventions by 96.75%, increased deployments from two a year to ~800 in 12 months with ~75% faster release times, enabled rapid COVID‑19 changes, and delivered nearly £150 million NPV—all with no service disruption.

Department for Work and Pensions

Mark Bell

Virtual Machine Environment— Replacement Program Deputy Director