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Redwood Systems performed this project in association with IBM, migrating both telephone and cable TV data for 50,000 customers. The impetus for the move was due to both the high cost of maintaining the existing system and the promise of new functionality.
The project commenced in July of 1999, and the new system went live in December of 1999.
Redwood Systems were responsible for the initial gap analysis, the ensuing data mapping and subsequent program design and build. Reconciliation and target ICMS file integrities were written to validate the whole end-to-end process.
Complexities encountered included account merging and product consolidation from a large set of mandatory plus elective components to a streamlined set of products whilst at the same time moving customers from any obsolete and redundant packages that where. Customers' bill cycles were also changed during migration and hence prorate generation was needed for the new system.
Most of the work was performed remotely except for project meetings and initial analysis; where 1:1 contact with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) was essential in garnering the requisite knowledge as well as building good working relations with the relevant people.
Following this initial information gathering stage, frequent conference calls allowed for accelerated design and development using a remote link.
A program control suite was designed to automatically submit the conversion programs to batch in parallel with each program returning control codes signalling completion and the presence of any errors or warnings. Rules and dependencies built into software enabled streaming the programs to speed up migration time and minimise any downtime.
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