CLIENT
50
thousand employees all over the world
100
operating countries
Philip Morris International (PMI) is the world’s leading tobacco company with 80,000 employees, and products currently sold in over 180 countries.
CHALLENGE
PMI’s Izhora affiliate is a significant asset for the tobacco company, as the third largest producer of its cigarettes worldwide. The 50-hectare, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility outside St. Petersburg is constantly accumulating diagrams, drawings, blueprints and other data, generally in AutoCAD format. Information is managed and stored by the EMC Documentum platform with a customized Desktop Client.
Periodically, as platform versions come to the end of their vendor support period or essential new system functionality becomes available, the system needs to be upgraded to new platform versions.
In 2004, as Documentum 4.1 neared the end of vendor support, the facility’s management decided to upgrade to the 5.2.5 release, and also replace its underlying Oracle database management system to Microsoft SQL Server to facilitate the reorganization of the plant’s IT infrastructure. Izhora did not have the necessary internal staffing available to accomplish this project and wanted a company with enterprise content management expertise and proven capabilities with complex migrations to perform a customized upgrade to the latest release of the Documentum platform.
SOLUTION
We have been meeting Izhora’s data management needs since 2002, which made us a natural choice to fulfill the plant’s upgrading tasks and manage the migration to a new database management system. We successfully deployed EMC Documentum platform version 5.2.5. As switching databases is not handled by a standard Documentum upgrade procedure, we performed the replacement of Oracle with Microsoft SQL Server.
In 2006, with vendor support again due to expire, Izhora management tasked us with upgrading the system a second time, from Documentum 5.2.5 to the 5.3 release, and replacing the desktop application with a web application based on EMC Documentum Webtop, as it requires less support. The switch also ensures all users are running the same current versions of all applications and increases availability and security, as a system administrator has better visibility over system performance and can control which applications and data each user is allowed to access.
Storage structure was also brought up to date with the implementation of a new hierarchy of files and folders, and actualization was carried out, with metadata updated.
Reksoft performed the following tasks:
RESULTS
Both upgrades to the latest Documentum release were completed successfully, meeting Izhora’s migration goals. The database conversion from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server was also performed, enabling further reorganization of the facility’s IT infrastructure. The switch from a desktop to a web application increased the high availability and security of documents, while improved storage and metadata model actualization has reduced document search time. Today, more than 100 users at Philip Morris Izhora benefit from the efficient business processes enabled by our application customization.
TECHNOLOGY
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EMC Documentum
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Microsoft SQL Server
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McLaren CADLink
SERVICE
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Upgrade
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Migration