In September 2006, a small medical research instrument manufacturing company in California contacted J&C Migrations, a smaller software migration specialty company in Massachusetts.

Their TI990, installed in 1982, was failing, and the manufacturer wanted a critical software application, supporting their Engineering, Production, Inventory, Sales, and Accounting departments, ported to a Windows Server.

Off-the-shelf Manufacturing and Production Control packages did not support the complex, multi-layered Bill of Materials their package had, and integration with Accounting packages such as Peachtree or QuickBooks wouldn’t reach the level of integration they wanted to replace.

The current application was being supported by Sandy Villarreal, who had led the creation of the software at a long time defunct company.   Sandy had been urging them for several years to move onto modern computers.   They had been searching.

Fortunately an uninvolved friend of the Manufacturer’s Comptroller suggested conversion. There was no copyright on the software, so there were no Intellectual Property barriers to conversion. The application, consisting of a quarter million lines of code, was written in four different computer languages, only the least of which, COBOL, was supported on the target platform.   So the manufacturer approached Micro Focus regarding the conversion. Micro Focus found the most common language was RPGII, and suggested contacting J&C Migrations.

Conversion requirements that J&C Migrations had to address, included identification of user acceptance criteria. Further conversion requirements included training the manufacturer’s team in the creation of test scenarios, program source conversion, addressing user interface key-stroke compatibility, data organization and security, data transfer (flattening and numeric expansion, transmission, capture, reconstitution, and indexing), and spooling and printing support.

After being the technical contact and domain expert, but before the conclusion of the conversion, Sandy died of bone cancer.   J&C Migrations assumed the responsibility of ongoing support on the TI, as well as the completion of the conversion.

The application was successfully ported, deployed, and tested over 14 months.   In the subsequent four months the manufacturer went through their Fiscal Year End and the Calendar Year End successfully, and retired the TI990.

At the conclusion of the conversion, J&C Migrations sought and received permission from the manufacturer to sell the package. J&C Migrations is dedicating this package to the memory of Sandy, who led its creation, and for whom its support had been a labor of love.