Migration of Maximo Management System

Business challenge

Lifecell uses IBM Maximo as a centralized management system for network operation and development. IBM Maximo integrates and automates more than 30 business processes across radio network, transport network, network control, and network planning departments and serves more than 1,000 active users, with 120-160 users working simultaneously.

Based on the legacy Maximo 5.2 technology, the customer’s management system was unable to meet the new scalability, performance, and security needs. The main challenges included the following.

• The management system had roughly 100 custom applications and complicated business logic. No migration procedure was in place
• The legacy applications were poorly or not documented and the developers who initially performed the design and implementation were not available
• Certain parts of the business logic were implemented in the form of PL/SQL procedures
• The IBM Maximo management system is integrated with a number of external systems, including SAP (material transactions), Oracle IDM (user information and organizational structure), NetAct Planner (site and radio link information), HP Temip (Trouble Ticket Management and alarm information), and Nokia, and Ericsson OSS systems (automated site halting)
• According to the estimates, the migration process could take up to one year. Within this period, it was necessary to perform development and enhancement for the legacy applications and all applications were to stay up and running during the whole migration process.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

The Maximo migration started with a preparation stage that included a visit to the customer’s premises by IBA Group experts. Following the analysis of the requirements and estimation of the scope of work, IBA Group participated in a tender organized by the customer and won it.

The migration project was launched in March, 2015. The project team included IBM Certified Maximo specialists, Oracle DBA, business analysts, a QA specialist, and a technical writer.

The project was implemented in four stages and for every stage a subset of applications was selected, forming an application group. Each application group was migrated, switching the production from Maximo 5 to Maximo 7 for that group within one night. Within the migration process, data synchronization procedures were established to ensure data consistency between Maximo 5 and Maximo 7.

For every migrated application, the following scope of work was done:

• Reverse engineering to prepare the technical task document that describes the application’s design, database objects, business logic, UI, and all data dependencies
• Data migration and synchronization plan to document the data sources to be migrated and the data sources to be synchronized between Maximo 5 and Maximo 7, including all required data and structure transformation
• Application UI transformation from custom Maximo 5 jsp pages to Maximo 7 application XML markup, ensuring identical source UI layout and structure
• Business logic, including workflows and java customizations for Maximo 7
• Transformation of the existing PL/SQL procedures into Maximo cron tasks
• Data migration and transformation according to the data migration plan
• Report transformation to match the data structure modifications.

The following IBA-developed automation tools became a part of the Maximo development environment.

• Automated Maximo configuration management designed to create and update Maximo objects, including MBO, domains, and person groups based on the repository data
• Automated Maximo 5 application analysis to identify and document all data sources used by an application
• Automated transformation of Maximo 5 visual application forms into Maximo 7 application’s XML, preserving source layout.

With the enhanced development environment, the project team managed to deliver the second, third, and fourth application blocks with an 80 percent reduction in efforts as compared to the first application block.

Results

The project was completed successfully in December, 2016 with positive feedback from the customer. The upgraded management system is stable and meets strict security requirements. With the newly available platform features, especially REST API and Web Services, the system is deeper integrated into the corporate information system, meeting the growing requirements of business units.

Konstantin Zhylin, Head of Department for Telecommunication Systems Operation at Lifecell

“We would like to express our gratitude to IBA Group for the IBM MAXIMO Upgrade they implemented at Lifecell. Our teams worked hard for almost two years and successfully completed the project. It is safe to say that it was an exceptionally challenging project that is second to none with regard to the approaches and methodologies applied. I’d like to thank every participant of the project for the work performed. In addition, I would like to underscore an operational excellence of the team, their flexibility in problem solving, sociability, and customer–centric approach. As a result, it became possible to build up the processes of project management and successfully complete the migration of 80 applications to the new version of Maximo, conduct the training of users, and launch the new system. We are happy to recommend IBA Group as a reliable and proficient partner who is able to solve the most sophisticated problems to the best advantage.”