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Month: September 2019

Introduction

Enhance Collaboration Capability & Accelerate Smart Connected Product Development Integrated PLM-ALM Platform Empowering Digital Transformation Across Product Lifecycle

PLM-ALM Solutions CoE highlights

  • Kovair, a silicon-valley global technology & solutions organization, is uniquely positioned to address ModelBased Systems Engineering adoption required for today’s smart connected product development
  • Kovair is a partner to some of the leading PLM technology companies such as PTC, Siemens & Aras focusing on providing end-to-end PLM-ALM Integration Solutions & Implementation Services
  • Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform, has more than 110+ bi-directional integration adapters connecting many enterprise applications across product lifecycle including PLM, ALM, PPM, & ERP systems
  • Kovair is also uniquely positioned to address multi-site, multi-user, multi-CAD, multi-PLM/PDM scenarios through its integration platform and provide professional PLM services with its well experienced consultants
  • Kovair’s PLM consultants have more than 50+ years of collective experience covering the spectrum of PLM services including Assessment Consulting, Greenfield & Brownfield Implementations
  • Kovair QuickSync provides turnkey error-free migration solutions to several global customers
  • Kovair’s PLM consultants are also experienced in doing both custom and OOTB upgrades
  • Kovair provides well-structured ALM-PLM Training & Support Services
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Solution & Services Offerings – Kovair’s ALM-PLM CoE

Kovair has partnered with some of the leading PLM providers like PTC, Siemens, ARAS to provide a suite of PLM services to the discrete manufacturing companies including :
  • Assessment Consulting
  • Green & Brown Field Implementations
  • Turn-key Integrations with a host of enterprise applications
  • System Upgrades
  • Legacy Data Migrations
  • Custom Application Development
  • Training & Support Services
Kovair-PLM-team-of-Solution-Architects

Kovair PLM-ALM Center of Excellence – CoE

Connected PLM-ALM Platform for Concurrent Product Development

Highlights-of-Kovair-PLM-ALM-CoE
Key Aspects of Kovair PLM-ALM CoE Kovair PLM-ALM CoE – Key Value Proposition
  • Kovair CoE is based on the concept of “Specialization leads to -> Expert Competency leads to -> Excellence” if synergistically applied
  • It fosters specialized competency, where each of the elements and tools across the Smart Connected Product Development Cycle have a critical role to play.
  • Each of the tools in the chain is considered the best of the breed in their respective domains and is well equipped for managing complexity in specific areas.
  • It aims to combine the best of PLM and ALM; and other participating enterprise solutions like ERP to provide a synergistic, integrated, and connected environment.
  • Kovair’s PLM Services leverage the strength of each of these best-of-the-breed tools in a synchronized manner across the connected product lifecycle to achieve the end goal of collaboration by implementing the most optimized solution by deploying the most professional resources
  • Cross tools traceability enabling the visibility from requirements to release across multi-functional heterogeneous enterprise tools
  • Efficient handling of integrations complexity that improves the engineering productivity for software and product lifecycle
  • Management of multidisciplinary data through integrations and synchronizations offering software engineering data and heterogeneous BOM management capabilities
  • Efficient process management through enterprise class workflow engine for closed loop systems like change, configuration, release management, to reduce complexity, when multiple specialized tools are involved in a product development
  • Searchability of cross tools in a multi-disciplinary data environment that reduces non-value-added activities like finding the appropriate part or product or software-related data while looking for a reference design or for BOM comparisons.

Reference Case Studies

Kovair’s well experienced PLM consultants have executed many successful projects for global customers in many PLM service streams.

Process Assessment Consulting

PLM-ALM-CoE

Process Assessment Consulting

PLM-ALM-CoE

PLM-ALM Integrations

Kovair through its flagship product Omnibus (an ESB-based integration middleware platform) has built robust integration capabilities for some of the industry’s leading PLM platforms like PTC Windchill, Siemens Team Center and Aras Innovator with other tools to follow. Through bi-directional seamless integration capability, many of the popular ALM tools like IBM Rational Family, Microfocus ALM, Microsoft ALM Product Suite, JIRA, JAMA, CA Rally, Polarion and GitHub can be connected to leading PLM platforms.

PLM-ALM-CoE

PLM-ALM Integrations

For a global leader in consumer products, Kovair had provided its ALM-PLM integration solution connecting its IBM suite of products in the ALM space and PTC’s Windchill PLM, some of the customer benefits are:

  • Bi-Directional synchronization of Requirement residing in RDNG with Rhapsody & Windchill
  • Traceability between Requirements of RDNG, Design Artifacts of Rhapsody & Change Request of PTC Windchill.

PLM-ALM-CoE

Smart Connected Product Development Environment

PLM-ALM-CoE

Smart Connected Product Development – Key Drivers

  • Today’s manufacturers are struggling with their current systems and processes to address key business objectives like delivery of high-quality products on time at a reasonable cost as these triple constraints tend to be mutually exclusive.
  • Though “Design Anywhere”, “Make Anywhere” is a vision every product development company wishes to achieve, many execution challenges like collaboration complexity to effectively coordinate with globally distributed teams like engineering, manufacturing and suppliers.
  • To achieve a competitive advantage, being innovative and still highly productive is very important. Complexity increases with changing environments like quality, risk and regulatory compliance needs which demand a product development environment to be effective in real-time communication.
  • To add fuel to the fire, today’s products are Smart & Connected with their Bill of Materials have components with a heterogeneous mix of Software, Electronics, Electrical, and Mechanical Hardware. Their data is generated from multiple MCAD, ECAD tools and managed in different disconnected data management systems many a time.
  • Adding to the complexity, new company acquisitions and mergers could bring a new set of tools & different data formats which prompts decision making from an enterprise IT systems standpoint to a centralized platform which can easily integrate and connect with newer systems as this enables synchronous communication and collaboration; very important for an effective smart connected product development process.
Area Challenge Reason
Collaboration Difficulty in communicating across departments for execution of systems engineering process Due to silos of distributed data among different engineering disciplines
Data Management Inability to maintain updated versions of data across the smart connected product development Lack of data synchronization across enterprise tools
Data Visualization / Decision Making No easy way to compare BOM/Design data iterations across different disciplines Mechanical, Software, etc. Software BOM might be in ALMs, Hardware is distributed in PLMs, PDMs, Electrical & Electronics data might be in local folders
Program/Project Management Tracking the project progress status on who is working on which deliverable across domains is a major issue Lack of dynamic project progress data availability at one place
Data Governance Inability to exercise streamlined access control with multiple stakeholders involved across various functions throughout the SCP product development User synchronization and role mapping across different tools could be a challenge
Traceability Tracking defect failure across the product lifecycle from Requirement to Release and to conduct root cause analysis for troubleshooting could be a nightmare SW, HW data, processes are distributed. Failure could be caused by either individually or both together. Lack of unified data visualization makes it difficult to identify the root cause
Migrated Data from HP ALM 12.55 to TFS 2015 Using Kovair QuickSync
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Introduction

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. is an American company from the domain of Healthcare Management providing a wide range of services like physician practices, hospitals management, and electronic health records just to name a few. Until now the company used HP ALM 12.55 to manage their Requirements, Tests, and Defects. Due to change in the internal software development processes and policies, the organization decided to move to TFS 2015 for managing their Requirements, Tests, and Defects. This implied that all the data residing under different artifacts across all the designated projects in HP ALM needed to be migrated to TFS 2015. It is not only the records but also the links between these items under the specific area paths needed to be migrated from HP ALM to TFS.

Challenges

The migration project was easier said than done! The crucial challenges that were addressed are mentioned in the points below.
  • The data that was to be migrated in terms of volume was in hundreds of thousands and replicating the data from the source to the destination manually would have been time-consuming and error-prone.
  • Since the two tools were from separate vendors, there was no inherent inter-connectivity between the tools.
  • Both HP ALM and TFS maintain the data in different ways and thus moving them in the correct format to the right location was pivotal for the project.
  • Finally, the most necessary feature was maintaining the quality of data that was to be migrated and ensuring that no data gets lost in the process.
  • Real-time monitoring of the migration status and performing a sanity check on the migrated data was an essential parameter as well.

Kovair Solution

In pursuit of the appropriate tool that will cater to their need in the best way possible, Allscripts approached Kovair for the QuickSync Migration Solution. As a part of the initial activity, Kovair understood the data structure of their existing HP ALM projects and came to a consensus on the migration use cases with AllScripts team. After analyzing the existing data, considering the time for completion and the volume of records to migrate, Kovair proposed multiple QuickSync instances so that the migration can take place in parallel from multiple instances. All instances were provided by AllScripts to carry on this migration. With minimal manual effort, the tool was installed in all the Servers. Post-installation, the effort mainly consisted of mapping the Projects, Entities, and Fields between HP ALM and TFS. Once this setup was complete, the rest was a quick automatic process and required very few mouse clicks to achieve in a complete codeless manner. The migration ensured that artifact hierarchy is maintained while data is getting migrated.
  • The top-level Test Scenario Folder of HP ALM got migrated into TFS as the Test Plan folder.
  • The HP ALM Test Scenario subfolders were migrated as Test Suites in TFS under which the HP ALM Tests were migrated as Test Cases of TFS.
  • The linked artifacts of Test Cases like Test Steps Call to Tests and the Attachments were migrated to TFS.
  • Along with the Test Cases, the corresponding attachments were migrated as well. Subsequently, the HP ALM Defects were migrated as Bugs to TFS.
  • All the links that existed between the HP ALM Tests and Defects were also migrated.
Data Hierarchy between HP ALM and TFS

Fig: Data Hierarchy between HP ALM and TFS

Kovair QuickSync also facilitated users to have real-time monitoring of the migration. The volume of successful and failed transactions could be monitored from one single window. In case of failed migration, detail level logs were maintained which provided root cause for each of the individual failures. This detailed level of information helped to identify the root cause behind most of the failures. These records were then re-migrated after the problems were fixed. The entire migration happened for 800,000 records with <.01% error.

Kovair QuickSync Business Values

  • Easy tool installation and quick initial setup.
  • Complete codeless configuration for mapping HP ALM projects, entities, and fields to corresponding TFS counterparts.
  • Successfully migrated 11 projects from HP ALM to TFS with a high volume of linked artifacts.
  • Each record having multiple links were migrated at a rate of 60 records per hour.
  • Easy monitoring capabilities having an objective and subjective statistical view of the state of migration with reports and logs.
  • Retry mechanism for any unsuccessful migration.
  • Turnkey solution based upon the transaction volume of data across all configurations and projects for any number of users.
  • 100% migration with <.01 % failure.

Project Execution Overview

A pilot POC project was done at the staging server of AllScripts to verify the capabilities of the QuickSync tool. The result was so satisfying that the Allscripts team moved forward with direct implementation in the Production instance. The Production implementation was done in 3 phases. In the first phase, the Kovair team reviewed the existing structure of data, project mappings and the field mappings based on the configuration of the production instances of HP ALM & TFS. Post analysis, we defined the mappings as required to fit their use cases. In the second phase, the configurations in QuickSync were done based on the mapping with a minimal manual effort. Finally, after the configuration was complete in all the provided servers, migration was started in parallel to complete the process faster. The occasional errors that occurred during data migration, were resolved in minimum time based on the detailed level information provided by QuickSync which helped to identify the root cause of the problems easily. During the entire process of migration, the client team members were also provided training sessions so that they can have a better knowledge about the capabilities of QuickSync. Post-training, the team members were able to perform the modifications that were required and monitoring of the activities with minimum assistance from Kovair.

Conclusion

Kovair QuickSync allowed AllScripts to overcome all challenges of data migration and move from HP ALM 12.55 to TFS 2015 within a few months in an incremental manner. The complete data got successfully moved from HP to TFS by maintaining the hierarchy and relationships of the record across artifacts.
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