In September 1996, Waterford Crystal were running BPCS v.3.0 with many enhancements and modifications. Prompted by the extensive press coverage on year 2000 issues, Waterford Crystal's Systems Development Manager, Carl Phelan set about looking at alternative trading systems including BPCS v.6.

In realising that the business was not ready for such a major systems change, Carl decided to evaluate some millennium products including MS4. After the installation of MS4 into a test environment and some IT and user testing, a decision was made to implement MS4 over 'live' BPCS on March 15th 1997.

Once this decision was made, the live BPCS environment was copied to a year 2000 test environment. MS4 was then run over this year 2000 test environment. The project plan was adhered to which included final IT testing. In addition, the year 2000 test environment was moved off-site to IBM to test how MS4 would react to system dates in the year 2000 and beyond.

At 6pm on Friday, 14th March 1997, the new MS4 object library was put live and the option within MS4 was taken to create the encryption programs to downdate the dates within the live database. By 11am on Saturday March 15th everything was complete, IT personnel were on hand to perform some light testing of the new live year 2000 compliant BPCS 3.0 with all Waterford Crystal modifications.

"Going live with MS4 has been an outstanding success and surprisingly quite a painless and fast implementation. It has certainly taken the pressure off us to move to a new trading system before the year 2000". Carol Buckley, Year 2000 Project Manager,Waterford Crystal Ltd.

Products © Case Studies