Just a little help please ....

My wife works in a local 5* hotel as a Meetings Manager and together with her colleagues have been told they will, starting next week, be required to work LONG hours for the coming 6 weeks 7-days a week - the reason being is this ....

They currently use a software package called 'Fidelio' and are moving to a new package called 'Delphi'(not sure if this is spelt correctly) - they have been told they have to input all the details from the old system into the new system MANUALLY! Now, I'm no rocket scientist but in this day and age there must be a way of tranferring, copying and pasting, porting (using fields, commas, etc.) or some other slicker method of getting customer details etc. into the new system - can someone please help as my other half thinks I'm talking out of my ring-piece!

Responses as to how this could be done would be much appreciated

Cheers
Phil

 

I don't know either of the products in question, but they both must have a dbase and therefore I suggest it could be done. I've been working on a data migration project since 11/2000 moving several different data sources onto one. Development and analysis required to do this has been huge though, so I'm guessing it would be substantially cheaper to migrate the data manually then get developers in to write an interface/transformations. Probably why they have taken the manual route.

Cheers, Sean.

 

Fidelio - I beleive, is a proprietry system. This may explain why they cannot get data out of the back end without having to pay hugh sums of money to buy the API.

Although, having said that, it appears to be running a Sybase SQL Anywhere database in the background, so I see absolutely no reason why data cannot be easily extracted out of this.

I think they are being a tad lazy on this one

 

the time and effort is usually incurred in data mapping - that is, defining what each field is and what it means in the old system and how that data relates to the new system (simple example - old system has one data item for persons' surname, forename, title; new system has 3 data items, one for surname, one for forename, etc. How to convert the one data item to three?)

If there's not a lot of history data to convert across, then it may be simpler just to re-key everything.

But sounds like a gruesome job (had a friend who had to do a similar exercise re-cataloguing a whole public library full of books, so the manual conversion practise is not unknown)

regards

 

Guys ... thanks for your replies, comments taken on board

Thanx
Phil

 

But they could screen scrape from one app to another so it does sound like they haven't tried to think about alternatives. Also would it be cheaper to use a keying agency rather than own staff ?

Dave

 

What is the new meeting software called.. and what is the back end. SQL, Oracle... Of course you don't have to do it manually...

 

Don't believe it can't be done. Of course it can.

Management thought process probably went:
Import data, requires coding etc cost is £xxxxxx
Get data entry agency to re-enter data, cost is £xxxx
Require existing staff to re-enter data, cost is £xx

I do hope they're paying them good overtime rates. They are paying them overtime, aren't they??

 

Phil, is Fidelio from Micros? if so, from their web site it looks like it might have an Oracle back end, in which case exporting the data is a straight forward task.

Delphi is a programming language, rather than an end user application, if you mean it is written in Delphi, then there is not a problem as it can directly access an Oracle database (we do this at my work for some of our products).

The only reasons I can think of having you manually enter the data are to save cost, and to make you feel as if you have been involved in the transfer process (hence happier to use the new software (read accept bugs that would otherwise upset you))

If you can find out more information on the systems (ie datastructures, databases used and how the fields map across; then give us a shout, I could probably throw something together in an evening that would save you 90% of the work)

 

I am an IT contractor and use Delphi I am sure I could write something for a small fee. If it is an Oracle database then data migration is easy you can use DOA components and ....blah blah.

Delphi is getting dated now so I don't know why they chose to use that?

 

I think I could write something for the cost of a Subaru!!