Case data-base migration

Situation

Company X, a trading company in disposables, will be merged with company Z, a manufacturer in disposables. The two companies already belong to an English organization with facilities all over Europe. The legal merge was already carried out but the merge in operating procedures was kept in path with the system merge. This case description emphasis on the merge of the two BPCS databases into a single database where company X will be added to the existing structure of company Z, as well as any organizational changes that result of the merge.

Problem

Company X implemented BPCS in March 2001 using BPCS V6.101. This implementation has been cumbersome and this had a bearing on the implementation and the efficiency of BPCS in this environment. Company Z implemented the same BPCS version in February 2002 after a relative short implementation project. Although there are still some minor issues to solve, this environment is stable and the implementation was a success.

The structure of the BPCS implementation at company Z has been set-up to enable the environment to be extended with other companies, or allow a merger with other company group operations.

Key objective

The new trading entity will operate as a fully integrated business where the processes of company Z will be the basis for this project.

Approach

A project group was installed, consisting of senior key users from the several departments of company Z and key users from the same departments of company X. This was done to ensure that emphasis was put on the procedures of company Z. The first step to be done was to list the business processes covered by BPCS at both companies. Where there is an overlap in process than the company Z processes will be the leading process and company X will be integrated into the company Z process. The next step was to prototype the procedures, on the company Z database, that where new for on of the two companies. This phase was ended with a conference room pilot, to ensure that the prototyping was done successfully, and end-user training, conducted by the key-users.

The actual database merge consisted of transferring the master data, code tables and running data from the company X data-base into that of company Z, with respect of data integrity and data consistency. Codes are overlapping if, the code itself exists in both environments or the contents of the codes exist in both environments but the actual code is different

Result

The new company was operational within 4 months.