NSC Group: Quality Services & Software Solutions Since 1970

The Project

FIST was a syndicate formed in 1980, by a group of NHS hospitals, to jointly develop Financial and Health Service application software for its members. The total annual spend of the NHS members was in excess of £100 million, serving over 3 million people.

In 1994, FIST was comprised of 26 Hospital Trusts based in Dundee and used a Fujitsu VME mainframe. Data was input over a network and there were remote printers in every Trust.

FIST wanted to migrate their two major systems - Financial and Contract Management - to a Unix platform with RDBMS. Out of 22 responses they selected Legacy Software Downsizing because their unique method of automated migration offered the optimum solution. LSD was also able to offer a fixed price quotation which avoided the worry of expensive over-runs.

The modules making up the Financial System were:

• General Ledger
• Accounts Receivable
• Budgeting
• Report Writer
• Payments (Non-Accounts Payable)
• Staff Statistics
• Accounts Payable
• Annual Accounts
• Capital Assets
• Endowments & Donations
• Payroll Analysis
• Control Module

The Contract Management System co-ordinated contracts between purchasers and providers.

The total size of the project was 482,000 lines, consisting of 360,000 lines of COBOL and 122,000 lines of SCL. There were 1033 different TP Screens and 510 Batch Programs. The Batch Programs were controlled by 170 Job Control Programs. The platform agreed upon was the Sun Sparc Server 1000 with 128Mb of memory, a Sparc Storage array and an overall disc capacity of 12Gb.

The Migration

The project delivery stages were as follows:

• Because FIST were going from an IDMS database to Oracle the first step was to deliver the Oracle Database Definitions. This took place eight weeks after contract signing.
• The embedded SQL to access the Oracle database was delivered about one month later. In addition to the IDMS database there were over 50 Flat Files which LSD also converted to Oracle.
• The Financial Systems used on-line printing, so LSD had to create for FIST the LSD Utility now called LSD Timer and Print Spooler.
• The testing of the 845 screens in Financials took six weeks, the 188 screens in Contracts 3 weeks. FIST were amazed that the screens looked exactly the same on the Sun platform as they had on VME.
• FIST used SCL as a programming language as well as for Job Control, but despite the complexity LSD converted it automatically to Korn Shell scripts.
• The final stage was delivery of both systems fully operational and using Micro Focus COBOL.

Implementation

Migration by the LSD methodology eliminates the need for emulation or middleware, thus improving performance. To illustrate this, the speed of the largest batch run was ten times faster on the Unix box than it had been on VME.

Also, because the system on Unix was identical to the one on the mainframe, there was no need to retrain the 400 users of the FIST systems. This represented major cost savings and smooth transition from the mainframe to Unix, with none of the disruption associated with re-engineering or re-writing.

Postscript: Three Years On

FIST became FINIX (FIST on Unix) after the migration. FINIX is an example of how an organisation's IT can be revitalised by a LSD renovation of their Legacy System(s). FINIX has since transformed their Contract Management System from a 'green screen' application to a modern GUI Oracle-based system running on Sun under Unix.

Using Micro Focus Net Express, they have been able to replace the old character based screens with modern Windows-style equivalents.

Postscript: Ten Years On

FINIX is now known as the NHS Tayside ICT Department