Down and Dirty
While the users and hardware were being prepped for the launch, Leo Judge, Children's manager of financial applications, was doing the real dirty work--the data conversion. Phase I of the PeopleSoft rollout involved replacing every legacy system for HR, payroll, accounts payable, general ledger, asset management, purchasing, inventory and materials management. Quite an undertaking, especially considering there were no fewer than four data formats in the mix: Oracle, RBMS, SQL and Pervasive Software's Btrieve.
While Andersen focused on building new business processes and logic for the PeopleSoft application, Judge's team performed data integrity checks on all the databases being ported into the new Oracle database. Judge had four people from the Children's application development team to assist his group in the conversion process.
"It was a very positive experience," he says, though "some issues arose" before the launch. For example, Judge says his team did not receive timely training on the new application architecture; this left them dependent on consultants longer than originally planned. Part of the problem: The team was stretched thin trying to support those pesky legacy applications. He also says that during the rush to meet the April deadline, Children's was not able to perform adequate end-to-end transactional testing, so performance bottlenecks could not be identified until the application was in production. This caused serious problems with report generation and database performance.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
