ABB saves 300,000 euros - old system decommissioned in six weeks

Acquisitions and divestments of companies have established themselves as a popular means of responding more quickly to market changes and increasing a company's own innovative strength. However, corporate agility must be reflected at all levels in order to achieve optimum synergy effects when merging and spinning off companies and parts of companies. This applies in particular to IT.

In 2018, ABB's turbocharger division acquired Tekomar, a small Winterthur-based engineering company. Their diagnostic and consulting software allows optimization of marine diesel performance and lifetime and fits perfectly with ABB Turbocharging's offering.

"Tekomar's software and expertise are very valuable to ABB Turbocharging. However, in October last year, the M&A department approached us and informed us that the licenses for Tekomar's cloud ERP solution would expire at the end of February 2019"

reports Hock-Ann Tan, IS Project Manager at ABB.

"Consequently, our task was to find a more cost-effective and simpler solution in just four months for the period after the Tekomar data had been transferred to the central SAP system."

The solution had to be convincing from both a technical and a business perspective. After all, legacy systems cannot simply be switched off for legal reasons once their data has been migrated.

Finally, legacy data and documents must be retained unchanged for the legally prescribed retention periods - in this case for a total of 13 years.

As a result, Hock-Ann Tan and his team were faced with the challenge of finding a technical solution to the legacy data problem that was also significantly less expensive than continuing to operate the legacy solution at its current scale.

"Technically, we had three options in principle".

Hock-Ann Tan says.

"Firstly, a greatly reduced continued operation of the legacy solution, if the provider allows this. Secondly, an archiving solution for the legacy data that matches the provider technology and can guarantee the revision security of the data via this route.

And third, a vendor- and system-independent approach that allows us to extract legacy data and store it in a legally compliant manner, independent of the migration to our SAP system."

Since the first option would have been too expensive and ABB did not have a suitable archiving solution in place due to its SAP strategy, only the third option remained.

"However, a recommendation quickly brought us to the JiVS solution from Swiss Data Migration Services."

The information management platform is based entirely on Java and is therefore system- and platform-independent. Its procedure for audit-proof data extraction and storage is certified by Swiss auditors, ensuring legal certainty for internal audits and external audits.

This is because JiVS stores all legacy data and documents together with their business context and documents every single step. This provides complete proof that the legacy information was transferred from the legacy system completely and unchanged.

If required, business users and auditors can simply access this information via a browser, which is displayed to them as if they were working with the original system. However, they only have read rights. Another advantage of browser access is that JiVS can be used as a cloud service and does not have to be implemented at the customer's site.

"Technically, JiVS convinced us immediately. But the solution was also superior to the alternatives in economic terms."

reports Hock-Ann Tan.

This is because the annual license costs for the legacy solution were around 50,000 euros. In contrast, the service fees for JiVS as a Service are a maximum of 10,000 euros per year. This means that the JiVS project pays for itself after just one year.

The contract was sealed at the beginning of December, so that work on the legacy data transfer could begin. An analysis of the information inventory revealed that for some invoice data, the associated invoice documents still had to be printed as PDF files.

Essentially, the information to be transferred was data and documents relating to orders, invoices, accounts receivable and payables.

Once all the preparatory work, including PDF printing and implementation of a secure data transfer method using Secure FTP, had been completed, the transfer of the legacy information to JiVS could also take place before Christmas.

On Valentine's Day 2019, the user accounts of the legacy system were deleted in the cloud. This enabled the project to be complied with before the license deadlines expired, so that no further fees were incurred for the legacy system as planned.