Master document migrations in months instead of years

The document management world is currently being shaken by the termination of a wide variety of long-standing core systems such as IBM ASF/DCF, Quadient/DOPiX or, as with Assentis, the shift to the Cloud. Insurance companies, banks and many other industries are therefore forced to switch to new customer communication management systems for compliance reasons.

Read how easily this challenge can be mastered with the Papyrus platform and its special migration tools which are integrated into the Papyrus Test Centre. Having that vision will help you to sleep well again.

What is the biggest challenge in migration projects?

Anyone who has looked into the subject in depth will quickly realize that the acceptance of the migrated documents and in case of adaptations their consistency requires the lion’s share of the project resources. This is mostly due to the fact that a lot of technical knowledge has been incorporated into existing applications, about which little or no documentation is available. It has worked for decades according to “never touch a running system”. The people involved at that time are no longer in the company or have other responsibilities. Source codes are difficult to understand and cannot be used by the business departments to find out about the implemented document business logic.

How can we untie this knot?

Papyrus has offered migration tools since long, e.g. for comparing documents of different versions. In order to verify desired results as well as compatibilities, extensive test cases are required for such migrations, but are also of use for standard software upgrades or when technical interfaces are changed. All document types and their data-driven variants can be easily and efficiently compared with a golden standard. After every change, no matter how small, the quality is checked in iterative test procedures: Are there deviations from the golden references? If so, to what extent, and are these desired or to be corrected due to the adjustments made?

The Papyrus Test Center

For such routine test procedures, the Papyrus Test Center offers exactly the right framework to create test cases, to define variants for each test case (e.g. different input data) and to store the expected result in each case. All test cases are managed centrally in the test cases pool, which are available for manual individual tests or recursive mass test runs. The test results are logged with the integrated comparison tool (AFP, PDF) and exported in machine-readable form (XML). Or the changes are visually checked by people from the test team.

By defining position tolerances, deviations up to a certain extent can be declared as not relevant, or even certain watermarks or image areas (e.g. signatures) can be ignored. From this, the reasons for reported changes can be quickly concluded and in the case of expected changes, due to improved results, the comparison references are adjusted or necessary corrections are made directly in Papyrus Business Designer or Papyrus Designer.

The test run is restarted until all results are as desired. Operate the Papyrus Test Centre with targeted test data sets or use it for migrations in parallel to production with the existing system to keep constant control over the quality of the migration to Papyrus. In this way, you considerably reduce the migration efforts, require fewer staff and bring your costs within a manageable range. Extensive 1:1 migrations, where thousands of document templates and building blocks have to be converted to Papyrus can be reduced from several person-years to 6-12 months.

Have we triggered your interest? Contact us. We have been experts in document migrations of all kinds for more than 30 years.