Case Studies
The employees can log in and view their information and assigned shifts. They also receive notifications, by email or SMS whenever a shift is delivered to them with full details of the assignment.
Currently the system manages more than 2200 active employees and has a 72% adoption rate on those employees. Hampton Roads Shipping Association is aiming for 100% adoption rate by the end of the year.
“It would be a full time job just to maintain data integration”
The system has been in production for over a year and data between Production and QA environments was very out of synch. There was no easy way to move production data to the quality or development environments and test with real data. Neither was there a way to reproduce data related errors that might appear in production. The amount of data and the constant continuous development cycles would require Hampton Roads Shipping Association to hire someone just to keep those environments synched and maintain the needed integration logic. This developer would become a single point of failure as they would be the primary source of knowledge and expertise on a highly complex and ever evolving migration process.
Increasing complexity was also an issue. Sitting on almost one hundred entities just in the core modules, along with all their complex relations, it became obvious how inextricable the system was becoming. After Hampton Roads Shipping Association started their migration process, the Infosistema DMM support and development team helped them overcome a couple of issues with the tool usage and was even able to release a new version of the tool with a very specific corner-case resolution. This process was very agile and took less than a week between installation and setup of DMM and the first successful migrations.
“I’ve spent months looking for a way [to migrate data] and hoping for a company like Infosistema to develop this type of tool”
“We gained the ability to very easily synchronize our environments without spending our own time building the scripts”
Mick Drevyanko, IT Director
MIGRATION WITH DMM vs HIRING A RESOURCE
80% cost savings
Hampton Roads Shipping Association is a nonprofit civic and trade organization, founded in 1971 to promote the interests of the Port of Virginia, to further the common interest of those business establishments within the Port, particularly those who hire waterfront labor. The Association renders assistance to the membership in the solution of maritime problems; maintains harmony between management and labor; fosters just and equitable principles and practices between labor and management; promotes safety; and works for the betterment, expansion and prosperity of the port.
They’ve been working the last two years on PortMaster, an application that aims to streamline, automate and optimize the work force management processes used by all parties involved: the employers, the union members they employ, and the union locals that represent those members. The employers can log in and lookup information on any member in the industry, to check their qualifications and training, work histories and overall employment profiles. Employers can also submit labor orders by work shifts indicating the required quantity of labor based on the type of work to be performed. Labor orders also describe the specific facility, work area, start time, and estimated job duration, as well as other metadata regarding the assignments. The skills and qualifications required to perform each type of work are configured in the system allowing for semi-automated matching of available members to available work assignments. It is the job of Hampton Roads Shipping Association to find these people and dispatch them to the job sites.
“I was very happy when I found DMM and realized the potential for what it can do”
Infosistema DMM allowed Hampton Roads Shipping Association to copy production data into their quality environment so they can test the application with current data. So, when faced with a specific use case or a user that is familiar with a particular module or process within the system, they will no longer spend time building routines to pull data that is meaningful to them. The test users now have a better context to test with and if they run into an error it will be way easier to track it down.
Infosistema is now working with Hampton Roads Shipping Association to provide a set of improvements and features into future DMM releases, like scheduling migrations and exporting data. These enhancements will increase even more the return on investment made on the product.
PortMaster Core Modules
0,43 GB
Volume of data migrated
97 tables, 874 columns GB
Complexity of migration
3:39 hours
Total migration time
1
Issue encountered during migration fixed in the next release of DMM
With DMM, Hampton Roads Shipping Association was able to:
- Perform data migration with minimal human intervention
- Feed quality environment with most recent data
- Improve their testing and error fixing processes, thus improving their Defect Escape Rate
