A large multinational manufacturer of Physical Facilities Equipment and Controls
Is is very common for workflow applications to use approaches, and rely on dependencies that tie them down to their on-premise environment. There are management, security, environmental, and platform differences that require significantly more than just relocating code to a different server environment.
This was certainly the case for this customer, who, over several years of outsources and intensely collaborative development, had also acquired substantial technical debt in the form of maintenance complexity, inconsistencies, reliance on outdated tools and approaches, as well as an unmanageable number of project tracks and toolkit versions – all actively used and overlapping in the solution tree. (The solution tree represents all the apps in the solution, the toolkits they use, the toolkits all those other toolkits use, and so forth – this customer’s apps had 8 layers of dependencies on average).
Last but not least, was the need to plan a transition that minimized risk, contained complexity, manage the timeline, created minimal business disruption and addressed key security management differences between on-premise and on-cloud operating environments.
See Salient’s Migration eGuide for details on the common challenges of migrations.
The solution first entailed moving as little of the on-prem technical debt to the cloud as possible. However, because doing this comprehensively would have required examining and making manual changes to potentially thousands of artifacts, Salient Process instead turned to its own automated workflow application analysis, modification and generation tooling.
Leveraging the tooling was a game changer for the migration, greatly reducing the number of hours necessary for migration, largely eliminating the potential for human oversight and error, accelerating detection and changes, and only signaling the need for manual intervention when greater context and human intelligence were required.
Another key to the solution’s success was the ability to merge project tracks for toolkits that (because of expediency and due to limited reconciliation options on the BPM platform) were allowed to diverge over several years without the meaningful prospect of converging back. This effort was also significantly enhanced by the Salient workflow analysis tooling, which helped point out meaningful artifact differences sometimes across as many as 11 tracks for a single toolkit.
Lastly, overarching the entire effort, was a dependency tree-aware migration plan for toolkit and applications. This allowed the migration team to implement a low to no rework conversion sequence and allowed getting the customer’s solution back to a normalized state for toolkit snapshot and tracks used across the entire solution’s dependency tree.
The migrated solution now runs on a cloud-hosted infrastructure that provably delivers on the benefits of an environment fully managed by IBM. Those key benefits include customer relief of platform administrative responsibilities and incredibly fast turnaround for delivery of product updates and patches.
The combined benefits of a significant reduction in the number of tracks, normalization of dependencies and the overall solution also allowed the customer to pay off a significant portion of the existing technical debt (at a fraction of the anticipated effort, through Salient’s migration automation tooling). Also, due to Salient’s migration tools, we were able to save the client at least 75% of the time it would have taken to manually do the migration analysis.
Contact Us
