Infor data strategy and modernization

Project Summary

The City of New Orleans embarked on a complex business transformation project, Project BRASS, which included the implementation of Infor CloudSuite Financials and Supply Management applications. To implement the Infor CloudSuite solution, the existing business data from several disparate legacy applications (including an IBM mainframe (VSAM), Great Plains, BuySpeed, and other various spreadsheets) needed to be extracted, cleansed, transformed, migrated, and reconciled. Additionally, Federal government audit and reporting rules required 20 years of financial data history to be migrated to prove grants were administered correctly through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other major events that impacted the city over the years. Recognizing the inherent risk and challenge that data posed to the success of the implementation, the city selected Definian to perform the data migration.

Project Risks

The data migration risk on this implementation was amplified by the implementation’s high profile, underlying data complexities, and limited internal resources. Additional factors included:

• Lack of understanding of the legacy applications’ underlying data, which was magnified the farther back in history that the data came from
• Significant data quality issues within the mainframe because of limited functionality set up decades ago
• Duplicate information within and across disparate data sources
• Complex vendor classification rules and migration requirements
• New GL accounting structures required extensive restructuring and reconciliation processes
• Substantial and lengthy historical data requirements, including 14 million general ledger records across 20 years of financial history
• Additional target system (MHC Software) needed to be implemented to accommodate the City’s complex contract attachment requirements
• Constant turnover without adequate knowledge transfer across City resources

“Definian is one of the best, if not the best, contractors that I have ever worked with.” – City Project Manager

Mitigating the Risks

To mitigate the identified risk factors, Definian leveraged several techniques to ensure that the data was ready for each test cycle and production cutover. Additionally, Premier ensured that the City employees, Infor consultants, and MHC consultants were educated, informed, and prepared for each aspect of the data migration.

• Performed a data assessment that provided clarity to the underlying data across the entire data landscape.
• Applaud’s mainframe data capabilities automatically accessed the EBCDIC data, significantly accelerating the process by eliminating the need for custom COBOL extracts from the City IT resources.
• Applaud’s powerful deduplication processing identified and consolidated duplicate vendor data across the landscape.
• Definian’s Infor CloudSuite CTQ (Critical-to-Quality) validations assisted with previewing conversion results and identifying records that will fail Infor’s system requirements and client’s functional business requirements, enabling the entire project team to address many issues before the actual loads were processed.
• Powerful delta and exception-based reporting focused the City’s limited resources on changed, new, and problematic data throughout the entire implementation cycle.
• Readiness dashboards that tracked essential metrics from the creation of mapping specifications to final load statistics were regularly shared with the PMO and kept management informed of the overall status.
• Definian’s data readiness process drove the project team to ensure that the data was ready for each test cycle and go-live by monitoring data quality issues, transformation issues, missing cross-references, and missing configurations.

“We are a public sector client and we would hire Definian for future conversions in a heartbeat. In fact, whether my next big conversion project is public or private sector, I will be reaching out to Definian for an opportunity to work on the project.” – City Project Manager

The Results

The combination of Definian’s data migration experts, Applaud data migration software, and our

EPACTL methodology ensured that the data migration was successful. the value Definian brought to the implementation was summed up in the following comment from the City made in front of the entire implementation team, “Definian is one of the best, if not the best, contractors that I have ever worked with.”

Definian’s approach made it possible to identify and resolve legacy and target data issues ahead of time, avoiding issues at go-live. Definian’s tools automated the vendor survivorship and merging process, facilitated the complex financial history requirements, processed the raw mainframe data, and generated detailed audit trail reporting. ’s expert consultants worked with the City and the various implementation partners to unravel the business requirements and drive data issues to completion before each test cycle and go-live.

The Applaud® Advantage

To help overcome the expected data migration challenges the organization engaged Definian’s Applaud® data migration services to eliminate the risk from their data migration and ensure the overall success of their transformation.

Three key components of Definian’s Applaud solution helped the client navigate their data migration:

1. Definian’s data migration consultants: Definian’s services group averages more than six years of experience working with Applaud, exclusively on data migration projects.
2. Definian’s methodology: Definian’s EPACTL approach to data migration projects is different than traditional ETL approaches and helps ensure the project stays on track. This methodology decreases overall implementation time and reduces the risk of the migration.
3. Definian’s data migration software, Applaud®: Applaud has been optimized to address the challenges that occur on data migration projects, allowing the team to accomplish all data needs using one integrated product.

The Challenge

The nature of software implementation is transformation. For institutions, governments, and enterprises that rely heavily on mainframe systems this transformation begins by confronting their own legacy data landscape, attempting to understand the technology that shaped it, and recognizing that enterprise software is only as good as the data that its runs on. Bridging the vast gap between mainframes and the Cloud requires a complex and comprehensive data conversion and migration effort. Issues handling data will result in project delays, cost overruns, and resource burnout. If the migration from mainframe to the Cloud is incomplete or inaccurate, end users will lose confidence and fail to adopt the new system. Definian’s mission is to remove data migration risk and our team has identified the following mainframe-specific technical considerations that must be made:

• Mainframe data must be converted from its native EBCDIC form to readable ASCII while simultaneously maintaining other complexities like packed-decimal formatting, binary fields, repeated segments, and Julian dates. Simply reading the data becomes its own conversion project, before any transformation work can begin.
• COBOL programming is inherently slow due to its verbosity, lack of structure, and poor modularity. As such, it is ill-equipped to handle the frequent specification changes and necessary short turnaround time during an implementation.
• Poor data quality abounds on mainframe systems because historically, they have not included the built-in validations and edits common on modern systems. This results in missing, inconsistent, and invalid data.
• The difficulties of COBOL programming together with poor data quality result in a mysterious and problematic data landscape – one that is difficult to understand in any comprehensive way. Consequently, programmers are forced to rely on incorrect assumptions, instead of facts, when developing conversion code.

Before the new system can go-live, data in the legacy systems must be consolidated, cleansed, converted, and transformed. Without the proper tools and approach, IT staff is tasked with clunky COBOL or RPG programming, file manipulations, and spreadsheet workarounds to prepare data for the Cloud. Consequently, less time is committed to training on the new system and other value-add activities like data quality initiatives, report building, and integrations.

Definian In Action: One of the world’s largest retailers wanted to implement a modern solution for Fixed Asset accounting. However, lack of understanding into their legacy mainframe solution was a major hurdle. Outside of COBOL copybooks, virtually no documentation existed and no-one was familiar with technical workings of the system beyond running the monthly reports. Definian leveraged the Applaud® data migration platform to reverse engineer critical functionality, reveal how depreciation and appreciation rules were being applied, and develop a transformation program for 1 million assets

The Tools

Definian’s approach is powered by our exclusive data migration software, Applaud. Applaud accelerates every step of the data conversion process using one team and one tool for data extraction, profiling, analysis, cleansing, transformation, and reconciliation. Leveraging our software and decades worth of experience solving the world’s toughest data challenges, we circumvent the key problems specific to mainframe data migrations.

• Built-in conversion tools give our consultants the ability to read EBCDIC data without having to write a single line of code. Immediate access to data saves times and money, allowing research and conversion development to ramp up sooner in the project.
• Applaud’s data repository quickly accommodates mainframe data sources making it possible to analyze mainframe files in relation to other sources in the data landscape, including ones that the mainframe system has never interfaced with. This makes formerly unsolvable problems – like duplicated master data across disparate systems – finally solvable.
• Comprehensive data profiling and analysis tools provide visibility into the mysteries buried in mainframe systems, leading to more focused requirements gathering efforts later in the project.

These tools have been optimized for the complex challenges of data migration. Naïve approaches rely on hand-coded extracts from individual mainframe files, conversion programs that are siloed based on source system or functional area, and COBOL programmers who are struggling to support data migration on top of their primary duties and training for the new system. To contrast, Definian uses Applaud to eliminate error prone and laborious hand-coding, provide a data repository with a holistic view of the data, and free up resources across the project.

DEFINIAN IN ACTION
‍A 22.5 billion dollar industrial conglomerate needed to shut down a mainframe system that cost $200,000 a month to maintain. The last remaining mainframe resource was desperate to retire, but after weeks of attempts, issues converting binary and packed fields left him and his entire team at an impasse. Definian took the lead and directly extracted, converted,and loaded the data into the target warehouse in half the expected time. This saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars and allowed our counterpart to triumphantly retire.

The Results

Implementation is not just about getting to the Cloud. It’s about getting there and building a better enterprise in the process. Definian’s involvement allows the rest of the project team to focus on the future of their organization rather than be slowed down by data concerns and difficulties dealing with aging IT infrastructure and applications. By having an approach that immediately addresses the technical challenges inherent to mainframes, Definian can quickly graduate to impactful, value-adding activities as part of data conversion.

Every implementation is unique, but in each case quality data makes the difference between failure and resounding success. Definian’s ability to directly extract and profile EBCDIC data without the need for additional resources or mainframe programming accelerates all downstream efforts and provides a 360 degree view of the data landscape. Direct benefits include merging duplicate vendors and enabling better payment terms and volume discounts to be negotiated, identifying inaccurate payroll deductions and missing benefits so that employees can be served more fairly, and automating address cleansing to eliminate wasted revenue on undeliverable mail. Definian’s proven approach and the Applaud platform deliver a predictable, repeatable, and highly automated process that ensures the data migration is delivered on-time, on-budget, and with the highest quality data.