Israeli Ministry of Labor Customer Story: Success

Meet the Customer:

The Israeli Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Social Services helps citizens who are in crisis due to disability, financial hardship, unemployment, discrimination, and exploitation. The Ministry processes more than 80,000 cases per year, serving citizens through its departments, local authorities, associations, and organizations.

Expose a 20+ year-old mainframe application to the web
Speed up handling of 80,000+ cases per year
Make system available to 257+ municipalities via the Internet

Increased applications processed by 570% in one year
Reduced time to process applications from 3 – 6 months to a few hours
Exposed mainframe application to 97% of municipalities with around 5,700 users

Leveraged development tools such as NaturalONE
EntireX deployed to open up the mainframe application to the web
ApplinX used to convert the green screen to a web-based user interface

Improving the welfare support process from months to hours

The Israeli Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Social Services assists people in crisis. Whether it is a disabled citizen seeking urgent housing or a person facing discrimination, the Ministry is there to help.

With a population of more than 9 million that is ethnically and spiritually diverse, Israel’s standard of living is significantly higher than that of many other countries in the region. Nevertheless, the country still faces issues in employment and social welfare that must be addressed expeditiously.

This falls to the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Social Services. The Ministry receives tens of thousands of requests from citizens for assistance each year. Departments from Developmental Mental Disability to Social Services and Youth at Risk are served by the Ministry. And often, some situations must be dealt with urgently.

In the past, the department was frustrated by the time it took to process each request—particularly for cases that required quick action. The hundreds of municipalities that handled the cases had to file them with the Ministry through a mostly manual process. This slowed the processing down and sometimes left people at risk.

Paper forms were being passed from the municipalities to the Ministry and back again, often requiring five different signatures for approval each time. Some individual cases took up to six months to process, and sometimes, cases would get completely lost in the shuffle.

Making the old new again

“ We needed all of the municipalities to participate in the process to make it faster, so we took the whole application and built a ‘cloud’ web service around it. We exposed it to the world! ”

Yehuda Zeve, Mainframe Development Manager Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services

The Ministry was using 20+-year-old green-screen application technology, and there was no way to make it accessible to municipalities over the internet. The legacy system was developed 20 years ago using Natural, Natural Construct, and Adabas. ApplinX was used to create a graphical user interface accessible via the web. To improve performance, the Ministry had upgraded its IBMZ® platform from z/VM to z/OS®. This new operating system provided greater accessibility and openness within its systems, giving the Ministry the ability it needed to make them accessible to its users.

Yehuda Zev, Mainframe Development Manager at the Ministry, said: “We needed to make it possible to connect the municipalities to the mainframe system through the Internet.”

He said the Ministry chose EntireX to successfully turn the older program into a web service.

Major improvements, faster processing

By exposing the mainframe system to the web, the Ministry’s welfare process execution time has dropped from months to hours. There has been a 570% increase in one year in the number of assignments approved.

During the modernization project, the application was updated to support new functions and comply with new regulations. It was done, as usual, using the Natural Construct processing capability. Therefore, all new parameters were marked as “optional” to reduce unnecessary interference.

The Ministry’s goal was to build an efficient, simple infrastructure for today’s web service and any future web services it might require.

Yehuda Zev said that updating the system was a very big challenge and not an easy task. But now: “It is very stable, it works, and it lets us do exactly what we want.”

New features improve the flow of forms

The new functionality made it possible not only to perform the application’s existing roles but also to implement new features. One of these features is handling the form processing. Historically, if a form had an error, it would be sent back to the user as soon as the error was detected—ignoring the rest of the form. As a result, users had to resend the form many times. Now, the entire form is checked before being returned to the user, and the user can resend the corrected form only once.

The Ministry’s current goal is to develop new web services using EntireX, including:

Reports on vulnerable members of the society who are currently at an institution (by date received).
Reports and/or updates of a specific procedure performed on any of the above persons.
Reports and/or updates of institutions’ specifications.

Today, Israel’s Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Social Services can now help vulnerable citizens when they need it the most. “The feedback has been unbelievable. Everyone is very happy with the result,” said Yehuda Zev.

Israeli Ministry of Labor

Meet the Customer:

Challenges

Outcomes

Solutions