Metropolitan Water Treatment Facility

Industry

Waste Water Treatment

Software Package(s)

Alpha Open VMS 1032 database analysis

Background

A mid-size sewage treatment facility (250 employees) servicing 28 communities in Milwaukee County.

Compaq Corporation, which manufactures and supports the Alpha processor, the OpenVMS operating system, and the 1032 database announced its intention to discontinue both support and new development of these products. The client has over 21 applications and databases that reside on the Alpha platform. The largest and most complex of these applications are those used by Industrial Wastewater Pretreatment Program (IWPP), Water Quality, and System and Flow Monitoring.

Failure to respond to this decision by Compaq Corporation cause:

inability to perform new development or enhancements,
inability to perform new development or enhancements,
and inability to recover from catastrophic failure.

Challenge

The client needed to know which of the 21 applications were still required for their operations. The requirement was to define the new platform and determine the effort required to move, rebuild, or retire each of the current Alpha-based systems.

Solution

The project deliverable included detailed solution documents for each application and historical database and identification of which databases could be retired. We also included the purpose of the application, a description of the process flow, solution options available, and our recommendation as to the best solution. The document also included a high level project implementation plan and estimated cost for completion.

Result

Completed the fixed bid project in three months on schedule with no cost overruns. Our deliverables became the requirements for the Phase II RFP.