ntl: Ireland Data Migration

This data migration was instigated by a strategic decision by NTL (Republic of Ireland) to upgrade their legacy systems. The main aim was to move to a more flexible billing engine from their bespoke system. This was carried out in parallel with the upgrade of their CRM to enable them to close down all the legacy systems. Redwood Systems were part of a team of around 40, which also included ntl staff and IBM operations and design technicians. The migration of all Cable TV related data was undertaken in two phases as follows:

Redwood Scope

Other than the extraction of data from source, which was performed by the client, Redwood completed every other stage of the migration process including analysis, programming, quality assurance, implementation and post migration support. Complexities of this project included, but were not limited to, the following:

• merging of 3 disparate franchises into one database;
• both the target systems were moving because they were still in the design and customisation phase;
• the Vantive 8 target database already contained Customer and PAF address data which had been preliminarily migrated for marketing purposes. This made address matching difficult from source target data to brand new target data;
• both the Vantive 8 and Geneva target databases contained data from manually loaded digital CATV and telephony customers;
• the fact that the target databases were already populated necessitated the use of target "shadow" tables;
• there were integrity problems between the CRM and billing on the source which required an extensive data cleanse effort;
• a decision was made to re-allocate bill cycles and frequencies at the time of migration.

Client's Comments from the Project Sponsor

Data Migration - Congratulations and Thank You

Now that the dust is settling from the migration weekends it's a good time to reflect on the success of the data migration programme and say a big thank you to all of you. Several months ago when we started the project we agreed three key objectives:

Ensure a high level of accuracy in the data transfer for all relevant recordsEnsure business continuity during the transfer Ensure the business can successfully operate off the new CRM

While we will be formally reviewing our delivery against these objectives in a couple of weeks, I think it is fairly safe to say that you have delivered - 99.7% of records were transferred, the weekends were professionally managed from a customer impact standpoint, and a few early glitches aside we are now running our business on our CRM platform. And the project was delivered on time and on budget.

The success is simply due to all of your hard work, commitment and resilience in the face of changing business priorities. It may not have been a particularly sexy project, but it will and is adding real business benefit.

Please forward this note to anyone I have missed - so many people have contributed in the last 6 months It's been hard to keep up.

Well done and thanks for all the hard work

Signed