Dial-a-Rent Car

The company is based in Paris and offers contract car leasing facilities around France and Europe. Dial Rent-a-Car was the first company to use Databorough's complete service to address the problem of the year 2000.

Their problem became pressing in 1995 simply because many of their contracts were for five years and they would be experiencing "millennium" problems the following year as a result. Jean-Marc Jouniaux, the Senior Project Manager explains the situation:

"We needed the lowest-cost solution available because the company had made no decision on the long-term computing strategy for the future. At the same time we needed a fast solution because our long-term contracts were normally for five years and we were in danger of failing to manage the business."

Dial's primary supplier was GSI, a leading French software house, and they, in turn, invited Databorough France to carry out the "millennium project".

Scope of the problem

Some of the core software was nearly ten years old and had been written to meet Dial's specific needs. It used a comparatively unusual programming technique of passing a long "control" parameter between all programs, which included a number of dates. In addition, it was necessary for other applications which were dependant upon these date files to be unaffected by any conversion. Other date definitions included day, month and year in separate fields and period fields of the type YYMM.

Solution

As a result of these complexities it was decided to add an additional "century" field and to use Databorough's X-2000 millennium software to automate the conversion.

The project began in June 1995 and was completed (including testing and implementation) within five months, in plenty of time for the new year. In the course of the process, some 49 errors were detected, but only five of these were conversion errors - the rest were previously undetected bugs which the customer had not previously triggered.

In this period the company had to incorporate additional changes to the core system to handle a change in French VAT procedures and rates, and this was managed through X-Control change management software to ensure that it integrated into the converted system.

Jean-Marc reports: "Since we went live in November 1995, not a single problem has arisen to cast a shadow on the success of the millennium conversion".