Best practices: Migration of the global logistics management system to process orders and invoices

Softengi LLC, 

Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, November 25, 2013

It was the first migration project which was implemented practically by Softengi experts at the territory of Switzerland. The customer, Ingersoll-Rand (http://www.ingersollrand.com) company, is a Fortune 500 listed Irish global diversified industrial company founded in 1871. Ingersoll Rand's products range from complete air compressor systems, tools, ARO pumps, material handling systems and more. At the moment the project was initiated the customer had one of the offices in Fribourg, Switzerland, where was established one of the biggest logistics centers working with companies worldwide, except U.S. and Canadian markets.

Thus all the orders the company was receiving all over the world were processed and realized at that Fribourg logistics center. In order to process all logistic orders the center had its own logistics management system which was used by thousands of employees worldwide. Then current logistics management system was including all logistic components such as ordering, invoicing, packaging, shipment, delivery, payment, as well as customers’ database and their history.

Legacy System and the need for change

The old system was created in 1980, written at COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language), one of the oldest programming languages designed for developing business, typically file-oriented, applications. Due to the wordiness of this language, COBOL applications are often very large, and many COBOL applications consist of more than 1,000,000 lines of code.

Together with this it is self-documenting language, which means that none applications written at COBOL have ever had any documentation. One of the design goals for COBOL, explaining why it is that much verbose, was to make it possible for non-programmers to read and understand COBOL code, therefore COBOL contains such English-like structural elements as verbs, clauses, sentences, sections and divisions, which by themselves had to explain the logic of the system without any additional documentation. This was the reason why the Ingersoll-Rand logistics management system was not documented. The customer’s logistics management system was working at Open VMS, a computer server operating system that runs on VAX, Alpha and Itanium-based families of computers.

At the moment the customer initiated the reengineering of the current system it was counting more than 20 years of use. The biggest part of the employees, who were starting to work with that logistics management system in early 1980s were naturally leaving the company, there were less and less people working with it who originally could recall the whole business logic of the system and had deep knowledge of the system. Thus, the need for change was simply inevitable.

The company took the decision not simply to create a new system, but to transfer the current desktop solution to the new modern web-based platform. Moreover, the idea was to keep both systems run in parallel mode for smooth transition, synchronizing the data in both systems in real-time.

Mohsen Taghavi, Manager of International Trading Companies’ Systems and responsible for the project from customer’s side says: “With continues high demand from our worldwide users for system connections, growing year after year, it was obvious that we had built up a successful Global Order Processing application supported by a Swiss based International Trading Company. There were decades of very specific business know-how from various company executives’ built into our in-house developed legacy system. We were processing half billion U.S. dollar-orders annually throughout the world with over 490 distributors and 1,200 connected users for a system availability of 365/24/7”.

Increasingly, the company was receiving requests from its business units and users around the world asking for a modernized and WEB enable application. “Due to our business specifics, we could not identify any ready out of box application to support our businesses; hence, we adventured into converting our legacy system. After reviewing and analysing various IT development vendors and professionals in different geographical areas, finally we have identified a serious partner and thus started our business application development/conversion journey…”, - continues Mr.Taghavi.

Softengi experts, who were then working as a team of Softline JSC and later became its spin-off, have proposed a solution to migrate the current system to the new modern J2EE platform. The basis of the system was Oracle database and Weblogic application server.

The migration process 

The first stage of the project initiation was the assessment of the current system. Therefore, two System Analysts from the executor’s side spent more than a month at the customer’s territory assessing and analyzing the system, communicating with the customer’s personnel, developing the project plan and, consequently, there was developed a proposal for the Ingersoll-Rand company on the development of new web-based logistics management system and the migration of the legacy system to the new one.

The proposal was describing project stages and the project completion time composed around three years. As a result of this work, it became possible not only to present the duration and stages of work, but to assess realistically the volume of the work to be done with the system, which at the project completion stage appeared 99% correct. During the project implementation stages the project team has performed following work:

- re-engineering of business processes (based on the analysis of existing Cobol code);

-with the help of communication with the employees there was restored system business logic, which was thoroughly documented;

- there was made a deep analysis of the system, allowing to find weak and vulnerable points which might cause serious damages to the work of the system and losses of money;

- designed and developed modern secured web-based J2EE system;

- designed and developed the open architecture to support further growth of the system (WAP, Web-services, etc.).

The most complicated task during the project implementation stage was integration and syncronization of legacy and new systems, as well as integration with other existing systems. However, both systems were synchronized in the way that the employee using the system could insert data in the legacy system, then change to the new system and the data was synchronized in the real time without time and information losses.

This part of work composed at least third part of the general project implementation process, however it allowed few thousands of employees using the logistics management system to change from legacy system to the new one smoothly and without work interruptions. Consequently, the training of employees how to use the new system was as well conducted by the project team. Some of the most challenging project tasks were following:

- Transfer of the system maintaining the work of the legacy system and synchronizing both of them;

- Management of three remote teams, consisting of Ukrainian development team, Swiss office team, which initiated the project and the U.S. team of the company from headquarters;

- Transfer and synchronization of the OpenVMS file system to the object-relational database management system of Oracle.

Besides that, part of the work was to restore the business logic of processes, which was lost due to the employees’ generation change during more than 20 years of legacy system operation, through reading of COBOL code and constant communication with older employees. The results of the reengineering were gathered by the specialists, and then the meeting with the customer team was organized in order to approve the restored business processes.

The gap analysis, security analysis, the analysis of possible weak points inbusiness logic were conducted, some parts of business logic were impossible to restore, therefore the specialists had to newly develop them. As a result of project team work, the new online logistics management system was developed and the transfer from the legacy system to the new one was successfully conducted. The project composed a set of more than 5 projects with total duration of 2,5 years were implemented. In general, there were more than 25 man/years delivered for the project. The Ukrainian team successfully completed the project in cooperation with the Swiss customer’s team.

About Softengi Softengi is a Ukrainian IT outsourcing service provider, which made its start in 1995, with more than 150 IT professionals daily implementing the business needs of our customers all over the world. Softengi's main competencies are outsourcing software development, establishment of development centers, outsourcing of IT business processes, IT consulting, development of solutions for business (based on Microsoft SharePoint), as well as providing customers its personnel for specific projects (IT-outstuffing).

We provide services using wide range of technologies (.Net, Java, web, iOS, Android, etc.) with a profound experience in banking, finance, insurance, government, environment, health and safety industries. Softengi has implemented its own solid Quality Management System, which is CMMI level 4 compliant, and certified ISO 9001:2008 and TUV-Nord. The production process is based on the world best practices, using Agile and RUP methodologies. Softengi is a Microsoft Gold Partner. The company’s software engineers are certified by Microsoft and Oracle.

The highest qualification of our Project Managers is recognized by the Scrum Alliance and The International Project Management Association. Softengi also has dedicated testing team with the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) certifications. Headquartered in Kyiv with offices in Ukrainian regions and representative office in California, we aim to gain a leading position among Ukrainian and Eastern European companies in the production of high-tech software and providing IT services to the clients in the U.S., Europe, as well as in Ukraine and CIS countries.

Among Softengi’s customers there are such world-known companies as Enviance Inc. (cooperating with McDonalds, DuPont, Walmart, Chevron and FujiFilm), Ingersoll-Rand, the Boeing Company, Peterbilt Inc., and others. Our exclusive value is “Inspired software engineering” – Softengi makes thoughtful solutions, being totally focused on customer’s expectations and turning into reality the business dreams of our clients. Please find more about Softengi at www.softengi.com www.facebook.com/softengi.ua www.linkedin.com/company/softengi

Or just contact us at info@softengi.com.