Performance

King & Prince found Pervasive provided a smooth migration of 10 years of legacy data from financial, manufacturing and warehouse systems. The project was swiftly completed with high data integrity.

Food service company conducts major legacy migration

Georgia-based King & Prince Seafood Corporation has been providing food service companies with a broad range of high-quality seafood products for more than 50 years. The company used Pervasive to conduct data migration of some 10 years of legacy data into a new ERP system.

Lots of legacy data, a need for automation and bi-directional exchange

To accommodate a growing business and projected growth in the number of new trading partners, King & Prince Seafood needed to move from a legacy environment to a more efficient supply chain ERP system. This required integrating data in proprietary formats from multiple legacy systems into a SQL database. In order to go live with the new supply chain infrastructure, King & Prince also needed an automated integration solution that would support the bi-directional exchange of EDI documents between King & Prince and the company’s bank, suppliers and trading partners.

Nonstandard data structures no issue 

CIO Bob Ashford, who oversaw the migration project for King & Prince, said, “Our legacy environment was composed of different financial, manufacturing and warehouse systems. We wanted to bring all of these operations into a single supply chain system and chose to implement Adage, an ERP system by Agilisys. We were thrilled about the ease with which Pervasive was able to extract, reformat, clean and load data from many different systems into the Adage SQL 2000 database.”

Migrating information from these systems required integrating more than three gigabytes of data from UNIX proprietary, older SQL databases, and HP 3000 databases into the SQL 2000 database. The entire migration went smoothly despite the challenges presented by working with nonstandard file structures. With the Map Designer’s intuitive GUI, semistructured data was easily mapped to a structured SQL format. Much of the data needed to be reformatted and cleansed between the older systems before being loaded into the Adage SQL database. The final data load was completed within one weekend.

EDI need met

To go live with the new ERP system, King & Prince also had to have a strong EDI transformation piece in place to support the growing number of inbound EDI transactions from customers, suppliers and trading partners and to support all of King & Prince’s outbound invoicing through the company’s bank. “In our legacy environment we had an EDI transformation package based on the HP 3000. Since we were moving to SQL 2000 the older solution would no longer work for us. We looked for an EDI transformation and processing tool that was easy to use and inexpensive. As we learned more about Pervasive’s EDI functionality, we decided it was an appropriate solution for this as well,” says Ashford. “It was working great as a data transformation tool, so we investigated it as an EDI engine.”

King & Prince is now using Pervasive as an inexpensive EDI mapping tool for its EDI translation. Pervasive polls King & Prince’s EDI VAN to check for documents needing processing. Finding files that need to be integrated with the ERP system, Pervasive technology brings the files down to servers for processing. It then calls the EDI mapping software, outputs a file readable by the ERP system, and moves the output file into a directory so that the ERP system can read it in. Continuing to process, Pervasive then calls the mapping software and creates a Functional Acknowledgment, which sends it to a Trading Partner to confirm the Order. All of King & Prince’s invoicing is also done through Pervasive providing the bidirectional translation necessary for EDI exchange with the company’s factoring bank. For Invoices, Pervasive looks for invoice files in need of translation. When it finds a file, it calls the mapping software, translates the invoice into an EDI file and sends it out to customers. Throughout these tasks, Pervasive is checking for errors and ensuring the integrity of King & Prince’s EDI data exchange processes. The integration engine remains the conductor for all of the B2B processes. King & Prince has also implemented a new Demand Planning tool, replacing its spreadsheet environment for forecasting. Pervasive automatically adds history to the demand planning software’s database as well as the extract, reformat and load the computer generated forecasts into King & Prince’s ERP system.

Pervasive Data Integrator: 'An excellent migration tool'

CIO Bob Ashford said, “If you’re going to transform files from one format to another, clearly Pervasive is the tool to use. It not only lets you map anything to anything, you can also set up a series of transformation steps through the Process Designer and then kick the whole thing off as one process. Pervasive was an excellent migration tool that enabled us to pull more than 10 years of data out of the old systems, cleanse and validate that data, and then import it into the new environment.”

New uses are discovered for Pervasive tool set

The King & Prince IT crew has continued to find additional uses for Pervasive that have saved valuable programming time. For example, Pervasive is used to pull sales forecasts out of the Adage system each month and bring that data into Microsoft Excel so that King & Prince’s sales staff can work with that information in a spreadsheet format. The information is then integrated back into the ERP system. 

CIO Bob Ashford adds, “We are also looking to the future with Pervasive. The product’s new support of messaging middleware will be important as we move to a larger, more robust B2B implementation. By using the functionality that already exists in Pervasive software we can save the considerable expense of additional messaging and XML transformation packages.”

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