Profile

The Glassman Consulting Group, Inc.(GCG), a New York-based IT consulting company, specializes in healthcare technology solutions. GCG is comprised of healthcare technology specialists who provide the right mix of tools and expertise that enable their clients to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and overcome limitations in their systems in order to maintain their core competencies and competitive advantage.

“We explored other alternatives, but chose CORE because they offered the right technology, process and tools. CORE’s workbench of software tools combined with the team’s depth of expertise in PowerHouse provided us with a high degree of confidence that the migration would be successful.” 

Bobbie Glassman, President Glassman Consulting Group

The Challenge

GCG’s client, a medium sized, international insurance company, relies on a health care insurance system, built in 1989, that was a character-based, custom application using Cognos PowerHouse® running on HP e3000 servers. The information associated with over 250,000 international insured lives is managed in the system. Approximately 120 end-users located at three sites use the application internally. There were three main problems associated with this large, complex system:

• Technology obsolescence: The system databases were running on HP e3000 servers, which will no longer be supported by Hewlett Packard as of December 31, 2010. The risk associated with obsolescence was the primary factors in the client’s decision to modernize their application.
• Functionality: While the custom functionality of the system met the majority of the current business needs, there were some requirements that the system could not accommodate. The level of functionality embedded in the system resulted in thousands of lines of code. This complexity combined with the file limitations set by PowerHouse created enormous challenges for the client.
• Costs: The costs to support and maintain the system were increasing. The current system was being “patched” to manage larger volumes of claims. Upgrading the system was paramount to reducing the operational cost of the system.

GCG’s client’s requirements were clear. They needed a solution with a modern architecture that could manage the complexity of their system, delivered as soon as possible. They wanted to preserve 100% of the custom-built application functionality that existed with their PowerHouse application. Minimal disruption and impact on their end-users was also important. And, they needed a robust platform that could support on-going future enhancements to the system.

Why CORE Migration™?

GCG looked at three alternatives for its application migration – buy, build and migrate.

• Buy: GCG looked for an off-the-shelf solution that would meet their specialized business requirements, but none were available that fit their budget and retained their unique functionality. The complexity of the system made this approach too labour-intensive, time consuming and expensive.
• Build: GCG considered re-writing the application from end-to-end. Although this would have allowed them to duplicate their custom functionality, they had concerns regarding the size of the project and the huge potential for “scope creep” which would be costly and would extend the timelines associated with the project.
• Migrate: Migrating the old application to a modern Windows platform – Microsoft® .NET -was the third option considered.

GCG chose CORE Migration because of the company’s expertise with PowerHouse and proven technology in migrating PowerHouse applications to a modern .NET platform. In addition, GCG was impressed with CORE’s Renaissance Architect™ framework that guarantees 100% preservation of the existing functionality while providing flexibility for future enhancements and customizations. And lastly, CORE Migration’s technology allowed them to automate the database migration which provided a low risk alternative to buy or build.

“The CORE team’s responsiveness and technical knowledge at all stages of the process was critical. And, their attention to detail was amazing. CORE suggested the production of “ghost screens” in batches which allowed us to expedite the process of populating the screens and logic – this saved us a significant amount of effort and time.”

Bobbie Glassman, President Glassman Consulting Group

CORE Migration’s Process

GCG needed to be closely involved with the migration process. Given their experience with the legacy system, the technical skills sets within their team and that they would continue to support their client, GCG chose CORE’s Self-Directed Migration Method.

Core Migration’s Self-Directed Method is broken down into logical elements depicting the various stages of the migration process. The CORE Migration team completed the initial stage of the migration process called Design Preservation. Once this stage was completed, CORE trained GCG’s staff on the Forward Engineering Toolkit which covers a broad spectrum of training from migration methodology from User Interface Training to deployment and maintenance management. During the Forward Engineering stage, GCG could access the repository from their site via a secure portal. The repository contained all the business logic and rules from GCG’s client’s application (populated in the Design preservation stage). GCG was able to use the forward engineering of the legacy source code, which is stored in the repository, to the target technology. The GCG team was able to easily follow the later phases of the migration from Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Acceptance Testing to Implementation.

The CORE Migration team completed the database migration from Image (non-relational) on the HP e3000 to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on Windows. Transact SQL procedures were created in order to update data in the underlying database.

In addition, CORE Migration was able to resolve several PowerHouse design issues for GCG. For example, the complexity of the system created challenges with PowerHouse’s file limitation (31 files in a program) which forced the GCG team to utilize ghost screens in order to get around the limitation. This proved to be very time consuming and labour intensive. The CORE Migration team provided an effective solution by removing the file number limitation so that an unlimited number of files could be used.

CORE Migration’s Solution

The new environment is Microsoft .NET 2005 using CORE’s Renaissance Architect Framework for .NET coupled with the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

“We are extremely pleased with the quality of our new application. CORE was a great partner – very focused on delivery, preservation of the functionality and increasing user productivity.”

Bobbie Glassman, President Glassman Consulting Group