From Cramer 5 to Cramer 6: OSS & BSS data migration

The Client

A leading European Telecom IT Consultancy that offers BSS/OSS transformation, integration, data migration, and other AMDOCS Cramer services to telecommunication providers.

The Challenge

Our client’s business model relied heavily on Cramer Systems — a part of Amdocs OSS product suite. Due to quickly evolving industry demands, the client company needed to move their system to a newer version of Cramer.

However, since Cramer systems are usually highly customized and fine-tuned, there is no one-size-fits-all migration tool for quickly transferring existing data to the new Cramer version. For this reason, Carmer data migration process is typically very costly and time-consuming.

The Scope

Azoft engineers were required to install and customize the new version of Cramer (v.6), as well as come up with a solution for simplifying the data migration process from Cramer 5 to 6.

The Solution

After carefully analyzing the client’s existing OSS and setting-up the new Cramer version, our team proposed an approach to simplify the data migration process from Cramer version 5 to Cramer 6. Please note that a large amount of data concerning the client’s network structure and network inventory was stored in various applications, in different formats (MS Excel, Vision, text files, etc.). For this reason, we decided to separate the data migration procedure into several stages:

• The first step was to collect all the data from various sources and store it in one temporary cloud database.
• Next, we set-up a team of analysts to carefully perform the process of data transformation and mapping from the temporary virtual database to Cramer 6. This stage was the most time-consuming, since the main workload was assigned to analysts and testers
• Having done extensive research about what’s available on the market, we found an innovative migration tool that was the best fit for our project. Besides automating the migration process, this tool helped us reduce downtime by taking advantage of the bi-directional synchronization of source and target data.

The Outcome

The data transformation process was carried out successfully: upon completion, the data was transferred with more than 99% accuracy. Upgrading to the new Cramer inventory system allowed our client to improve network monitoring cycles and significantly cut costs on manual testing.