NSC Group: Quality Services & Software Solutions Since 1970

The Project

Sira Business Services Plc provides office and industrial cleaning services through two wholly owned subsidiaries - Sira Business Services (UK) Ltd and MCN Services Ltd. It employs over 2,000 cleaning staff and provides services to many organisations within the UK.

Sira chose Legacy Software Downsizing to migrate the Contract Cleaning Services System, which administers the management of contract cleaning staff from the recording of time worked through to preparation of wages, as well as producing the billing. It was written in COBOL in the 1980s to run on Fujitsu VME equipment with an IDMSX Database. When ICL was absorbed into Fujitsu, this was the last remaining system on the mainframe.

In order to make significant ongoing cost savings, Sira decided to migrate the system to a Dell platform running Micro Focus COBOL under Windows and using SQL Server as the RDBMS.

The Migration

The contract was signed with LSD in November 2003 and the system was delivered back to the client in June 2004. The migration involved no disruption to the Sira IT Department as all the work was done at LSD's premises in Manchester.

Towards the end of the project a member of Sira staff came to Manchester to test the migrated application and familiarise himself with the new source code, spending a total of nine days in Manchester spread over three weeks.

Implementation

The system was installed at Sira's premises in London on June 6th and went live in August. The Fujitsu mainframe was then decommissioned.

Now that the application has been migrated to Windows and SQL Server, and has a more modern user-friendly appearance, one option is to licence its use to other companies in the Contract Cleaning industry.