Case Study

Communication Firm: System Upgrade

Business Objective

A regional communications company needed help in enhancing, maintaining and operating its legacy mainframe billing and order support system.  This system provided more than 3,000 of its customer service representatives with access to customer data so they could negotiate, and enter order and financial changes for the down-stream systems, reducing the production interruption rate.

Solution

We provided outsourcing support, including project management and onsite/outsourced staff, to oversee the needed enhancements, maintenance and operations of the system.  Our solution was to migrate the system to Endevor, which is a library control mechanism whose environment provided a much tighter control on the programming environment, as well as the operational environment.  This effort entailed identifying all production source codes, conducting extensive tests to ensure the codes were current and then migrating them to production.  Semi-annual releases of the enhanced system were successfully implemented and the production interruption rate declined from 7 to 0.7 percent during the past seven years of the contract.  Specifically, we provided the following services:

• Production support
• Creation and maintenance of a test environment
• Participation in analysis, design, and implementation
• Assistance in creating system specifications
• Development of programs in various programming languages
• Program testing 
• Preparation of system test scripts

Technical Environment

This legacy mainframe system consisted of approximately one million lines of code written in PL/1, COBOL, Assembler, and IMS DB/DC, which we placed in the Endevor environment.