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 Data Migration
 

Complex Data Migration

Adtranz

At Adtranz, a legacy system which managed all the mechanical design data had been used in production for several years. By the end of the 1990’s, the legacy environment held over one million components belonging to more than 50 global locomotive projects and operated at three sites in Sweden. 

Adtranz had a legal requirement to support the engineering data belonging to all the existing production locomotives and previously supplied products for up to 30 years. Consequently, the legacy data had to be migrated into the new enterprise-wide environment.

Ken Tomlinson was appointed as the Technical Project Manager and worked closely with the Project Sponsor throughout the entire project.  Initially a study was undertaken to ascertain the project’s feasibility and identify possible technical solutions. 

Working closely with the User community and the common PDM implementation team, Ken developed a data migration programme and managed it in several distinct phases:

bullet A migration strategy was agreed which adopted an incremental transfer based on the business requirement.
bullet A data cleansing exercise took place to remove unwanted legacy data and correct any data inconsistencies.
bullet The migration utilities were developed and tested.
bullet The data comprising the mechanical design data, CAD drawings and technical documentation was migrated. The data was checked and signed-off by the user community.
bullet The legacy system was retired from full production.

Due to the amount of data being migrated, the migration process took several months to complete. During this period, Adtranz still needed to perform business as usual. 

The project approach adopted a close coordination between user communities, system development and management.  This ensured a combined ownership of the solution and resulted in the successful operation of the entire migration process with minimum disruption to the company’s business.