How to reduce Impact of increasing a field length of AS400 file

I am currently working on a project where there is a file which has a field of length 3 (packed decimal). Under the project, we need to increase that length to 5 packed decimal.But this change is causing a lot of impact on the system as lot of programs and queries need to be changed/recompiled. Is there any other alternative which can be thought of in this case? In other words, is there any option in AS400 other than increasing the field length (changing the structure of the file) to handle this situation? Just an FYI...the file does not have a DDS and is created using SQL script.