Bridgestone Firestone South Africa has migrated its application systems from a mainframe platform to a Sun Solaris environment, with the help of PQ Africa and Software Performance Improvement (SPI).
The move, which was completed successfully in less than five months, allows Bridgestone Firestone to retain its existing applications while enjoying the flexibility and added functionality of an open system.
The migration from VSE/ESA on a Hitachi 600 to a Sun E4500 has delivered a significant improvement in response times achieved, in particular by the user community. As well as being able to port its entire legacy system environment to the new open platform, the five months required for the re-hosting of the application was a much shorter time commitment than that required for a complete re-engineering of the Financial, Manufacturing, Distribution and Human Resources systems.
In sharing his vision, Group Financial Director, Ray Barlow stated: "Having completed this migration to Open Systems, Bridgestone Firestone South Africa is now ideally positioned to explore the emerging technologies available in the e-business world. We are justifiably proud of the effort of all concerned."
Bill Kruger of Bridgestone Firestone attributes the success of this significant project, in a remarkably short timeframe, to a number of factors, the exceptional teamwork between the parties involved being the most important.
"The enthusiasm with which this monumental task was undertaken gave rise to some of the best teamwork displays seen in the industry for a long time," comments Kruger. "While the Bridgestone Firestone team retained primary ownership of the project, we relied on PQ Africa and SPI to provide us with exceptional service and advice to make the process as pain-free as possible."
Kobus Gerber of PQ Africa believes equal credit should go to the management team at Bridgestone Firestone for the manner in which the project was undertaken. "There was a top-down commitment to the project and ensuring that the investment in the original systems developed on the Adabas/Natural platform was not lost, and all information and applications be transferred. The implementation date was also strictly enforced, confirming a trust relationship Bridgestone Firestone has built on integrity that exists between its users and its IT services."
In addition to providing the Sun equipment for both the production and development environments, PQ Africa provided technical support on both platforms and supplemented this with integration project management. SPI provided the technical leadership for the project, implementing the migration and ensuring the seamless change over to the new system.
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PQ Africa was formed as a result of the merger of Persetel Holdings Limited and Q Data. Comparex Holdings Limited has a 50% minus one share interest in PQ Africa.
The black empowerment group NITAC (the National IT Acquisition Consortium), led by Real Africa Holdings Limited, holds a controlling interest of 50% plus one share in PQ Africa.
PQ Africa is the leading provider of competitive, innovative and flexible business solutions based on information and communications technology. These comprehensive solutions include systems integration, consulting, package implementation, software development, outsourcing, hardware, software, peripherals, voice, video and data communication systems, customer relationship management solutions, and networking equipment and services. Internet solutions include the development and deployment of electronic commerce, electronic data interchange-based solutions and digital authentication.
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