Software Professionals, Inc.



	LARGE U.S. RETAIL CHAIN STORE
	Outsource of production support at SPI’s offshore development center in India

	THE BUSINESS NEED
	Provide production support services for batch applications of inventory management system

	THE SPI SOLUTIONS
	SPI executed the successful transfer of production support responsibility for Inventory Management application from the client to the offshore development center located in India . SPI planned and delivered the training for knowledge transfer while production support was provided from the offshore development center.

	OVERVIEW OF THE PROJECT
	The scope of this project was to provide support for Inventory Management applications on a 24x7x365 basis in an onsite/offshore mode. U.S. day time support was provided by an onsite team and U.S. overnight support was provided by the offshore team. The project team provided support to fix a run-time production problems associated with existing Inventory Management applications. They performed the following tasks on a day to day basis. Day-to-day production support. On-call activities. Log, correct and migrate production fixes. Update production system documentation for changes. Maintenance of the change log for programs. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) were defined for this project. There was the categorization of support requests (run time production problems) based on the business needs. The project team resolved/escalated the critical problems within an hour of notification. The software and hardware environment in which the project was executed consists of: Hardware Platform - IBM Mainframe Software Platform Operating System - OS/390 Languages - COBOL- II, CICS, JCL , ISPF (Interactive System Productivity Facility) V- 5.0. Databases -DB2, TERADATA, IMS Tools and Utilities DUMPMASTER ESP Expeditor PLATINUM DB2 MON INSYNC MS Word – Documentation tool MS Excel – Documentation support MS Outlook – E-mail Emulator – EXCEED REMEDY AR System – Problem tracking & support The offshore team accessed the IBM Mainframe, Remedy Server, Web Portals and other servers. A transition plan was prepared at the beginning of this project that was divided into three main phases i.e. Initial Phase, Knowledge Transfer Phase and Ongoing Support Phase. The objective was to transfer the service responsibility from the client team to the SPI team in a carefully planned manner and to ensure a smooth transition without affecting the existing services. The following was executed: Initial phase Formed the project team Developed an assessment of the system Prepared knowledge transfer plan Knowledge transfer phase Gained an understanding of all aspects of the application systems, associated procedures and controls. Analyzed all aspects of service delivery, availability and reliability. This phase typically includes: Study of business documentation. Study of business overview presentations by users and/or existing team members. Study and analysis of technical overview documentation. Study and analysis of past run time problems. Study of existing procedures. Training on operation of the problem management tool. Undertaking production support under supervision of the current client support team. Identifying configurable items, tools used for configuration management and process for configuration management. Ongoing support phase Support and problem management. Contact analysts responsible. Publish status report on web. Resolve day-to-day issues. Application code changes requested by the client - onsite/offsite. Communication with the stores and data center



	LARGE U.S. RETAIL CHAIN STORE
	Outsourced services

	THE BUSINESS NEED
	Populate data in the Event Planning Database on SQL server database

	THE SPI SOLUTION
	Populated the Event Planning Database on SQL server with data extracted from existing Teradata, DB2, MS Access and MS Excel databases.

	OVERVIEW OF THE PROJECT
	The Event Planning Database project dealt with the development and the implementation of a custom Event Planning Application Database. This supported the creation of the event planner, allocation of media, projection of the advertisement expenditure by media & event, allocation of the advertisement expenditure and media responsiveness analysis in order to support the Marketing Event Planning. SPI was involved in this project to populate the Event Planning Database on the SQL server with data extracted from existing Teradata, DB2, MS Access and MS Excel data. The SQL server data model was different from all the other databases and scripts were used to populate the tables with data. The SQL server data was then accessed by a front-end application in order to customize the views of various kinds of information. Responsibilities of the SPI project team included: Creation of Teradata scripts and jobs for data extraction. Creation of DB2 data extraction jobs. Automation of data downloads from the mainframe onto Windows platform. Creation of SQL scripts to load data into SQL server. The following methodology was followed for the execution of the project in an onsite/offshore model. The project was carried out on basis of the requirements from database tables from the front-end team. The SQL server tables were populated with extracted data from Teradata. The onsite team did the requirement study, client interaction, offshore coordination and the implementation work. The offshore team performed design, development and testing activities. Technology Used on this Project Teradata Database and Extraction Utilities, JCL, SYSOUT, DB2 Extraction utilities, NDT2, File Transfer utilities, MS SQL Server 2000, MS Excel Spreadsheets, Data Transformation Scripts, Stored Procedures, SQL, OLEDB Connectivity, Terminal Client Software.