Major material handling equipment manufacturer
moves from UNIX to LX!


RICHMOND, VA, Spring of 2000

One of Potomac's clients, a major midwest equipment manufacturer, faced a very serious problem back in the fall of 1999.  The hardware platform they were using was not Year 2000 certified and the software they were using was not Year 2000 compliant.  The application they were using was written in LINC hosted on a Unisys U-6030 and the development environment was a Griffin database, with the resultant application on an Oracle database.

The manufacturer was very happy with their existing environment, but recognized that Year 2000 was not going to allow them to continue operating as usual.  They evaluated a number of alternative solutions, but the clincher was Potomac’s commitment to recover their historical data and bring it forward into the new application.

“The LINC/Griffin/Oracle platform is a viable processing environment, unfortunately I do not come across too many resumes of people with those credentials!” states Bill McDonald, Vice President, Potomac Systems.  “Our recommendation was to convert their data into our applications and then migrate to an LX host.  This environment is easily supported by Potomac and Unisys”. 

“We were able to convert their entire Oracle database into a DMS II database.  We also modified our code to support functionality they had in their legacy applications.  The best news was that we were able to increase their throughput up to 300%".

Potomac did face some “issues” in this project.  We did not have an Oracle database expert on staff nor did we have adequate exposure to the DEPCON product.  We contracted with Unisys Technical Services group for the data export from the Oracle database and for the DEPCON installation and configuration.  “Our team of professionals was able to support the Oracle to DMS II data conversion.  We also provided personnel on-site to assist Unisys in the DEPCON installation and configuration.  With this small investment of manpower, we have garnered technical expertise for future DEPCON opportunities". 


Questions? Want more details? Contact:

sales@potomacsys.com
804.423.5300


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