Consolidation of Multiple Source Systems to TrackWise

Overview

The client is one of the largest US-based research pharmaceutical companies, and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Objective

These days, the story is all too familiar. After several corporate acquisitions, the client’s worldwide auditing processes became disconnected. The legacy audit information was managed in disparate sources by a variety of geographically dispersed technologies. In sum, there were five source systems and hundreds of thousands of documents, which included records and attachments.

The company objective: streamline operations and move all data to a single TrackWise destination, with a revised configuration that supports the requirements of the harmonized processes. This case study focuses on the effort to consolidate the five source systems’ data into a single instance of TrackWise.

Migration Challenges

Commensurate with such worldwide, multi-organizational consolidations, these migrations presented a number of challenges. Different business groups within the corporation had different practices, as reflected in the varied data sets, which required standardization and enrichment to meet the constraints of the target system. The transformation rules were not obvious and the users’ time was limited. Data cleansing requirements necessitated data standardization to correct inconsistent nomenclature, and the source systems lacked the family hierarchy required by the newly deployed TrackWise system.

Valiance Solution

Given the number of source systems, user groups, IT involvement in the US, Europe and Asia, Valiance had to establish program oversight and communications. The team needed to train various constituents on the migration process. This training was specific to each group’s responsibility. For example, user training focused user acceptance testing on the oversight of data cleansing activities, to assure the final result met with all of their expectations. Communications established detailed weekly reporting for each migration workstream, intermigration team updates and the means to summarize pertinent information for management.

Valiance migration methodology was leveraged for each migration. Detailed analysis and testing derived the right information and the right point in the process to guide the teams to a successful and predictable outcome for each source. Considering the variation amongst the sources and differing personalities working on a world-wide effort, the level of consistent predictability was most impressive client management.

Results

Large scale consolidations are characterized by unexpected events uncovered along the way. Given the experience of the migration team, the unexpected challenges were efficiently identified and remediated. For example, there were a number of external interfaces to the source systems not originally identified, such as a PeopleSoft application. The design process included the means to provide a snapshot of the source data for those systems that had required a feed to complete the migration without interruption.