Atlas Copco.

Atlas Copco is a Swedish company that specializes in manufacturing compressors, power tools and construction and mining tools. Because their applications are installed in over 60 Atlas Copco companies worldwide – each of which has its own local applications and interfaces – sufficient time was needed to roll out the updated apps to each sales office, which would then require time to apply local changes to their core systems.

Clearly, Atlas Copco’s core millennium compliancy was needed in a hurry.

For several years, Atlas Copco had been relying on Datasolve Systems International, in Kent, England, to assist in the support and development of its BPCS system. A study team from Atlas Copco and Datasolve chose Databorough’s X-2000 product. Databorough's reputation for stability had already been established in its X-Analysis reengineering products, it had a lot of experience with BPCS, and the company contracted to perform the conversion effort at a fixed price, which meant Atlas Copco could budget ahead for the project with complete certainty.

Richard Brighton, a Datasolve consultant, notes that Atlas Copco’s conversion challenge was enormous. The BPCS version in place was an early one, and "It’s a large system of more than 2.5M lines of code that has been worked on by many people over a long period of time," says Brighton. "As a result, it was becoming difficult to maintain."

Databorough’s primary business is creating software products to help reengineer corporate applications. Its X-2000 product is the result of many years experience of application reengineering, and is capable of converting a complete system in 24 hours with no manual intervention whatsoever. For Atlas Copco this was ideal, as Brighton explains, "We had to get that core system out to the sales offices, and they needed the speed and productivity provided by full automation."

Earlier this year, Databorough started the project by performing successive, overnight runs to achieve total conversion automation of the core system by December 1997. The projected completion date for the project is now set for February 1998. Alan Pollard, sales company support group manager for Atlas Copco, points out, "Since the project is fix-priced, it won't cost us any more than we originally budgeted."

As for advice for future projects, Pollard and Brighton note that about 85 percent of the problems they’ve encountered during the conversion were due to trouble spots in their own software. For example, Brighton notes, "We had missing objects and source, mismatches between objects and source, non-date fields referring to date fields, date fields referring to non-date fields, and hard-coded libraries in display file definitions." Both men agree that you should get your libraries in good condition first, and make sure that your system is in good shape and as error-free as possible – or, as Brighton says, "really screwed down tight."

Pollard says, "The project has gone well. Databorough's methodology allowed us to give them a copy of the system but keep on doing development and maintenance." The next step will be to test the converted system and roll it out to the more than 60 companies around the world who then have the option of making modifications to the converted programs or simply running their local systems through the X-2000 conversion program. "But at this point, we're quite happy," says Pollard. "The project has gone well."