Case Study: WEA Migrates to Oracle Financials

WEA Inc. distributes products for its parent company, Warner Music Group. As part of Warner’s data centralization and standardization project, WEA needed to migrate to Oracle Financials.

Challenge: Aging System Laden with “Work-Arounds”

WEA had been using the same accounting system on a DG AOS platform for more than 20 years. This aging accounting system was laden with user-invented “work-arounds” that had been developed over the years. RBZ&A had to understand those homegrown procedures to ensure that all the data transferred correctly to the new system. In addition, WEA wanted to keep the old system as a backup, which required making it Y2K compliant.

Solution: Planning and Programming for a Smooth Migration

After several discussions with the IT teams and business users at WEA and Warner Music Group Shared Services (WMGSS), RBZ&A made the old accounting system Y2K compliant. RBZ&A developed ways to maintain the existing file structure, avoiding unnecessary file conversions.

RBZ&A then created a set of specifications and programs for migrating to the new system. The developers poured through the historical data, and created ways for the users to sanitize it. Finally, the company designed programs to extract the data for conversion into the Oracle financial system.

Because of the exhaustive planning work, the migration went beautifully, and users no longer need to work around the old system’s inflexibilities.

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