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Business Needs: In the ultra-competitive telecommunications industry, Bell needs to implement changes quickly and expand hours of service. To meet these ongoing needs and to protect the company’s IT assets from the risk, Bell decided it needed to modernize one of its strategic applications, the Bell Customer Record System (BCRIS) by converting from a Bull GCOS (Bull:GCOS) platform to an MVS platform.
BCRIS is a mission critical order processing application which stores and controls customer profiles, equipment orders, and service requests for over 10 million Bell customers in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. BCRIS processes an average of 1.5 million online transactions per day generated by 3,500 client representatives in 65 business offices. It was therefore imperative to Bell that BCRIS suffer no performance degradation as a result of the migration, and if possible, improved performance was very desirable.
IT Needs: The challenges presented by this migration project were numerous:
- Migrating 997 online and 1,032 batch/subroutine COBOL programs in 18 months or less.
- Duplicating or improving upon the sub-second TP8 response time on the Bull.
- Reducing the nightly batch-processing window to reduce scheduling constraints on “downstream” systems fed by BCRIS.
- Converting 192 IDS-II record types from a network structure to relational under DB2.
- Implementing English and French versions of the application.
- Creating a hardware capacity plan was needed to replace two large Bull systems: a DPS9000/893 in Ontario and a DPS9000/892 in Quebec.
- Reducing the time required for database unload and load processes for databases that ranged in size from 45GB to 65GB.
- Incorporating ongoing Bull Y2K changes into the converted BCRIS code.
- Developing an integrated conversion team and project plan with Bell personnel.
Solution: The conversion team, utilizing the proven BluePhoenix PlatformMigrator tools and methodology, successfully met all of these challenges. First, a conversion planning study and pilot project were performed under the “feasibility phase” of the project. During this phase, the entire BCRIS IDS-II database was converted to DB2, along with 53 online TPRs, 5 batch programs, and 129 subroutines.
This process was successfully completed setting the stage to move forward with the “mass conversion” phase. Only a few relatively small problems were identified and resolved during the post-implementation warranty period. Today, BCRIS runs on a MVS platform using DB2 as the relational database and CICS as the TP monitor. Online response times have dropped from an average of 0.6 seconds on Bull to 0.3 seconds under MVS.
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