Our customer is one of the largest medical device contract development and manufacturing organizations in the world, serving the cardiac rhythm management, neuromodulation, and cardio and vascular markets.
Our customer is utilizing Kaba application for their time entry and shop floor data collection. Kaba is a Windows-based Application, which customer extensively utilizes for its various manufacturing sites and operations like clock in/out, issue materials, payroll, job schedule, real-time production control status, efficiency reports, and supplier and customer info.
Given the limitations of the hardware, operating system and capacity related performance issues, our customer decided to undertake a comprehensive approach of splitting the Kaba functionalities by hosting the shop floor data collection portion under a custom-built Kiosk application hosted on AWS.
Our customer aimed to migrate the Time Entry and Payroll responsibilities to different third-party tools and move Shop Floor Data Collection to their in-built Kiosk application with a focus on ensuring high availability, security, and scalability within the AWS Ashburn region. As their current and trusted managed services provider for over 12+ years, Apps Associates was selected as the partner for this project based on the quality/price/integrity of our deliverables and our proven expertise implementing value-driven, high performing solutions over those years.
The project spanned 14 weeks in 2 phases (1 for non-prod servers and 1 for prod servers). Each phase included spinning up two new servers with the latest supported Operating System, installing the latest version of Microsoft SQL Server database and establishing connectivity between the new servers and existing ERP system.
Apps Associates successfully completed both phases and is currently supporting production operations via our world class managed services platform without any deviations.
Our customer has one production and two non-production environments.
Environment Details:
Our customer aimed to modernize their Time Entry and Shop Floor collection application by ensuring high availability, including a disaster recovery option. The current Kaba application was running on a 32-bit Windows Operating System with no valid support. Due to the Operating System version, older Xen-based AWS instance types were the only options for running this workload. Finding a more modern Nitro based instance type compatible with the outdated OS was challenging as many newer instance types were incompatible with both the application and the Operating System.
As a result, the server remained on an older generation instance type, leading to underwhelming performance. As customer was looking for alternatives to replace the Kaba application, Kiosk was identified as the best option for the Shop Floor collection. Customer wanted to leverage AWS Cloud’s new features to reduce costs, streamline support efforts, and eventually retire their old Kaba application. The AWS cloud platform was chosen for its performance, agility, scalability, and modern infrastructure, providing the capacity to support the organization’s future growth.
Apps Associates collaborated closely with the customer team to gather requirements and design AWS resources, optimized for maximum efficiency across both Prod and Non-Prod environments. This process involved two phases. The first step in the migration project was spinning up two new Windows servers, installing MSSQL database in one of the servers, installing the Kiosk application on the other server and establishing a connection between the Kiosk environments and the existing ERP database.
The customer application team installed the custom-built Kiosk application on the application server.
Testing (Unit, Integration and User Acceptance Testing) were performed by Customer IT/End User teams as part of the different iterations and all business functionalities were tested and validated successfully.
The production go-live was spread across multiple dates, each for different manufacturing sites.
During the migration, the teams encountered a few issues. Copying the on-premises database took a long time due to an internet bandwidth issue. This was resolved by adding a physical standby database and by working with customer’s third-party network provider to increase internet bandwidth. Additionally, the Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) was running for a very long time. After multiple tries and research, the upgrade team identified the issue with custom packages related to 3rd party integration (NodeJS). Once identified, the upgrade team came up with a mitigation plan to fix the issue and moved forward. The environment features significant customizations, many of which included hard-coded values. The team spent considerable time replacing these hard-coded values with variables to mitigate future impacts.
Apps Associates is a premier enterprise applications and technology advisor, counseling and executing across every stage of the enterprise transformation journey—not just the destination. For more than two decades, Apps Associates has closely collaborated with decision makers across nearly every industry, offering end-to-end integration, modernization, and cloud migration services. By helping to break down the silos within today’s most complex business challenges, Apps Associates is unlocking solutions and efficiencies that scale into future opportunities. Learn more at appsassociates.com or follow on LinkedIn.