Global BioPharma Upgrades Multiple Repositories to FirstDoc

Overview

The Fortune 500 biotechnology pioneer specializes in the research, manufacturing and delivery of medicines to patients worldwide.

Objective

This global biopharmaceutical company needed to move forward with a planned global implementation of FirstDoc to manage clinical and regulatory documents. As a key part of the migration project, legacy documents stored in older Documentum repositories, Livelink, and filestores needed to be migrated to the new FirstDoc system. Further, the number of documents that needed to be moved to the new system were in the millions, and the total content size was on the order of terabytes, all of which were required to be consolidated in the new system.

Migration Challenges

The company previously managed migrations internally, but the migration tools used to date delivered mixed results and were costly to manage and validate. In addition, the migration tools were not configurable and required custom coding to perform any significant data transformations.

The complexity of the migration project was a challenge in and of itself. Besides facing the migration of millions of documents, the effort involved several types of source systems, each with its own unique set of mapping rules. The client needed a migration approach that would leverage the FirstDoc configurations for permissions, folder linking, and data validation.

In addition, system adaption was a constant challenge, and the company needed assurance beyond widely practiced manual sampling practices that the content was migrated correctly in order to maintain user confidence. Whatever migration tool was selected for the project needed to transform the data into the required format for import, as well as move content to the correct location.

Finally, there was a perceived lack of trust between the client’s IT team and its business users, resulting in significant management challenges.

Valiance Solution

Understanding the challenges ahead, the global biopharmaceutical company determined that it needed to enlist the expertise of the Valiance migration team to meet the goals outlined for the project.

Unlike competitive migration products that did not meet the client’s “no custom coding” requirement, TRUmigrate and TRUcompare configuration interfaces provided a commercial off the shelf solution that did not require any custom coding, saving the client team significant associated time and costs.

Results

Following its strategic engagement with Valiance, the client experienced many short and longterm benefits.

Near-term results for the client were evident. Valiance’s TRUmigrate solution successfully migrated millions of documents from legacy Documentum, Livelink, and filestores to the interim location and format required by the client’s import utility. In addition, TRUcompare was used to verify the 100% data migration at the field level.

Valiance was also able to identify requirements and hidden concerns that the client never considered. TRUcompare detected unexpected issues with the initial version import process, including document duplication and missed documents that were not reported in the import log. Given the volume of migrated documents, this issue would surely have been missed prior to release had a traditional sampling approach been used. The client development team used these results to address the issues and improve their overall process.

Longer-term considerations were also a key outcome of the FirstDoc migration project with Valiance. In fact, the client’s success with TRUcompare led to other uses of the software, specifically to verify high-risk migrations in Global Document Management and in Informatics systems. In addition, TRUmigrate export was adapted for other projects to retrieve data for divestitures and legal holds.