Context
The data migration was performed for the national carrier of one of the Arabian Peninsula countries.
It operates scheduled international services throughout the Middle East, to the Indian subcontinent, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America,
from its main base, international aviation hub airport. At the time of the migration the airline maintained 25 of their own aircraft,
as well as 12 aircraft operated for the national government, across 9 diverse aircraft types.
Description of the challenge /
customer problems
The airline purchased a new software system for their internal MRO operation: AMOS by Swiss Aviation Software Ltd. To provide continuity of maintenance and airworthiness records it was decided to have existing records transferred over to the new system. Migrating data between MRO systems requires several types of expertise:
General commercial aviation operation knowledge.
Aircraft maintenance (MRO) industry knowledge.
Database maintenance and programming skills.
Business software system implementation experience.
Specialist knowledge of involved software packages.
Since the implementation of a large new software system was already placing serious strain on our client's internal IT resources, they decided to contract an external data migration provider (Output42) to perform the data migration task.
As with any large-scale data migration project the main challenges were:
Ensuring existing data is correctly extracted and interpreted at the source.
Ensuring existing data is validated for correctness and completeness.
Matching data from several legacy sources (Maxi-Merlin, 7+ additional systems, Excel files).
Producing data in a format suitable for transfer into the new system.
Ensuring a predictable, confident go-live.
Process
Output42 was approached by the airline based on a recommendation from a previous customer with a similar project. Cooperation started with the project scope definition phase where existing legacy systems and data sources were identified and evaluated, followed by a timeline, and cost estimate.
Next, a 3-way agreement was established between the customer, the software implementation team (Swiss AS) and Output42 to ensure the data migration process would be closely aligned with the larger AMOS implementation project. A shared project plan was designed, and data migration milestones were set to support key user workshops, acceptance testing and final go-live of the new system.
Solution
Output42 is a specialized aviation software house, employing domain experts and developers with 10+ years of experience in commercial aerospace and aircraft maintenance systems. We were able to provide a team of experts to analyze the requirements of the Engineering department and establish seamless technical cooperation with the IT department.
The key source system in the project was Maxi-Merlin, which was already out of production and out of support at the time of the migration. Output42 were able to provide a Maxi-Merlin administrator/developer with 20+ years of experience in an airline environment. This ensured that customer's IT department did not need to dedicate any significant manpower to the data extraction stage of the process.
Once data was extracted from a variety of sources it needed to be collated in one centralized system for cross-referencing and validation. As part of any data migration project Output42 utilizes a proprietary in-house data migration software suite. It is highly customizable, with programmable inputs, validations, business rules, and outputs. It was used to ingest all existing source data and to produce output in the exact format required by AMOS. After data analysis and migration script creation the software was able to accommodate all of customer’s data validation and cleansing requirements.
Typically, an AMOS implementation project for a medium-sized airline takes approximately 12 months and a data migration project follows a shared schedule. Over the course of the project Output42 took an iterative approach to data analysis, script implementation and user testing. Because the actual data migration process was highly automated by the custom software suite, it could be repeated in regular intervals (about 2-3 weeks), as well as on-demand at any point, with each iteration bringing incremental improvement to data completeness, consistency, and correctness. Each such iteration also served as a rehearsal for the final go-live-day procedures to ensure all teams (customer, implementation, and migration) and all systems would perform predictably and successfully.
Effect
The result of the project was an on-time, on-budget data migration and a successful go-live event, with the Engineering department having confidence in the accuracy of data in the new system, and with the local aviation authority's approval.