The Client

The client is a non-profit, voluntary healthcare foundation with chapters and affiliates across the world. Its main objective is to support and fund diabetic research, in order to find a cure for a prevalent disorder and its complications. The foundation is the largest source of diabetes research funds in the world.

The Project

The clients’ existing donor and gift data resided on two proprietary database systems with approximately 75% of the data overlapping, which led to redundancy, performance issues, maintenance problems and complications in data management.

Quintegra was invited to conduct a study of the existing situation to understand the current systems, state of conversion, the conversion problems and user requirements from the new system. At the conclusion of the study, Quintegra recommended a two-phased approach to the problem; complete data conversion to Oracle and customization of the system to meet critical requirements during the first phase, and address secondary level user requirements in the next phase.

The salient features of the conversion process/methodology created by Quintegra include:

	Review and finalization of the mapping document and user sign off
	Creation of a test plan and validation of test results with expected results
	Development of detailed, user friendly error reporting formats
	Setting up a separate, parallel test environment to run the conversion
	Creating automated conversion validation scripts to minimize the user conversion verification time
	Defining a system acceptance plan for user acceptance of the data conversion

Customization of the packaged software to meet the critical minimum requirements was carried out simultaneously with the data conversion activities. Customizations included:

	Development of a "Gift Acknowledgement" add-on module to generate more than 50 types of acknowledgement letters that are generated on a daily/ weekly basis
	Development of a "Mailing Module" to implement the direct mail functionality (segmentation and mail generation), and to perform analysis of the responses to the mailing
	Development of operational reports, such as chapter membership reports and campaign reports
	Parallel testing in the production phase was carried out and reports from the old and new systems were compared for accuracy

Value Created

	Migrated over 1 million database records for improved data consistency across systems and processes
	Customizations were carried out, which precisely met the needs of the client
	The migration methodology adopted provided significant cost and time cycle savings
	The new database system improved the client’s responsiveness to the operational environment
	The migrated solution included full audit trail, enabling disparate and geographically disperse teams to work effectively and rapidly