| Amount invested: |
$50M |
| Organization: |
Subsidiary of major oil company |
| Original Plans: |
To appreciate the original plans of this multi-year saga, we must go back to the days of IBM's S/38, a forerunner of the AS/400. The intention was to reduce the mainframe with a S/38 mid-range system solution in order to reduce costs and improve service to the end users by 'speeding up' application development. Application packages were to be used for most of the requirements. |
| Unanticipated problems: |
Before the initial plans were completed, but
after the staff had been retrained, IBM superceded the S/38 with the
AS/400.
The applications packages available on the AS/400
could not handle the required volumes and the user had to resort to custom
applications which tripled the initial time frame for conversion. In
addition, many of the more technical applications would not effectively run
on the AS/400 and a variety of Unix and PC servers had to be installed for
specific applications. The original mainframe operations/support staff had
been disbanded, but the various divisions now employ three times more
operations/support staff in total. |
| Project Status: |
The conversion was completed but took almost six years
compared to the original estimate of two years. However, by the time the
conversion was complete many of the new applications needed replacing and
the work involved was likely to be excessive. A decision has been taken to
move to SAP using a mainframe database server to reduce costs. |
