TAX INDUSTRY >>> Legacy System Conversion


The Marmon Group is an international association of autonomous manufacturing and service companies with corporate headquarters in Chicago.

Business Problem

The Marmon Group's Corporate Tax department was relying on a 15-year-old Oracle system hosted on Unix to manage the tax compliance process. This mission-critical system was becoming (with each passing year) less stable, harder to maintain and backup and increasingly difficult to support and enhance. In addition, the interface was slow, complicated and outdated, increasing the difficulty of training new users.

Solution

Migrate the mission critical tax compliance software to a stable platform, that integrated well with the current tax department environment, while maintaining all existing functionality. Add additional functionality where possible and allow for future growth. In addition maintain the accuracy of decades worth of tax information and keep down time to an absolute minimum.

The Bone Group migrated the Oracle/Unix legacy system to Windows NT using SQL Server 2000 as the back-end database and a Microsoft Access Data Project to generate the forms, reports and menus.

In order to ensure a smooth conversion process the Bone Group documented the existing system's functionality and modeled the database design in Visio to enhance performance. A data conversion tool was created that could be reused throughout testing and implementation, allowing testers to work with the most recent data.

During the development process, The Bone Group worked closely with the tax department to understand which pieces of the system worked well and which could be improved. To ease the review process for the tax department, The Bone Group setup the ability for the tax department to review the system over their existing internet connection. This gave the tax department testers the ability to review the system from their desk, at their own convenience.

Benefits

• A smooth transition from a legacy system to new state of the art system that could be easily integrated into the existing tax department infrastructure.
• A reduced learning curve for new users with the new design and familiar windows interface.
• Quicker response time and improved data integrity with the new system
• The ability to generate complex reports in seconds and preview them on screen.
• The ability to export reports to Excel for further manipulation.
• New search functionality that allowed the tax department the ability to create complex queries with a wizard like interface.
• Backups that could be performed easily and integrated into the tax departments overall backup strategy.
• A graphical display of the unit consolidation hierarchy to help speed the setup and management of the consolidation structure.