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ALM Data Archiving After Migration: How to Preserve Engineering History When Decommissioning Legacy Systems

Replacing an ALM system shouldn’t mean losing years of engineering history. Learn why legacy data retention matters, why common workarounds fail, and how purpose-built ALM data archiving helps organizations preserve traceability, compliance, and institutional knowledge after migration.

Case Study

How Migration to Azure DevOps Using OpsHub Saves Henry Ford about $80,000 Per Year

Introduction to the Case

Henry Ford was using a legacy solution to test its mission-critical PeopleSoft environment. It used Oracle PeopleSoft solutions for all of its HR, procurement, payroll, CRM, and finance activities. Each year $4 billion (approximately) of the organization’s revenue was processed through the system.

Some of Henry Ford’s mission-critical activities that was processed through this system included:

Benefit enrollment periods when its 23,000 employees have a short window to select their health insurance plans
Year-end closings that require all of the financial systems to be balanced so W-2 and 1099 forms can be sent out
Just-in-time inventory that entails sending out purchase orders each afternoon, so supplies can be received later that night

To reduce costs and make better use of internal resources, Henry Ford decided to switch to Microsoft Azure DevOps .

Ecosystem Before Migration and the Associated Challenges

Over past ten years the Henry Ford PeopleSoft team, comprised of developers and business analysts, had developed a huge history of test cases and data. It carried out comprehensive testing, including unit tests, system integration tests, and integration tests with external organizations, including banks, suppliers, and insurance companies, as well as performance and load tests.

The team did not have dedicated testers and depended on business analysts and end-users to do the testing. This worked well, but the small team used to get overwhelmed during the peak periods. While the team had invested time and money to train a few of its business analysts to develop and modify test cases, their expertise was limited, and the health system had to utilize external consultants to make complex changes and develop procedures for new PeopleSoft packages.

The Decision to Shift to Azure DevOps

Over the past several years, the rest of the IT organizations at Henry Ford had standardized on and developed strong expertise using Microsoft Azure DevOps for development and testing. Motivated by this internal competence and rising cost pressures associated with U.S. health care reforms, the PeopleSoft team decided to investigate using Azure DevOps for its testing needs.

With Azure DevOps, there was an opportunity to reduce costs in a number of areas, including but not limited to:

How Opshub Helped Henry Ford Health System in Migration

After Henry Ford PeopleSoft team decided to switch to Azure DevOps, they chose Microsoft Azure DevOps Industry Partner (VSIP) OpsHub for leading its migration activity. By working with OpsHub, the PeopleSoft team was able to migrate its entire test environment, including test history and data. The fast, accurate migration enabled the PeopleSoft team to quickly leverage Azure DevOps without losing vital information from its legacy quality management environment.

OpsHub was willing to do a lot of upfront work with us to prove how all of our historical data could be migrated over. They did a great job validating the effectiveness of the OpsHub solution, and best practice solutions.

OpsHub Integration Manager enabled rich migration by recreating all the transactions that had been executed against the source system and replaying them against the target system. With this approach OpsHub was able to preserve history, attachments and relationships while doing the complete migration.

“We used an iterative process with Henry Ford Health System. We set up the migration and ran it, then did a thorough review with them. Each time we refined our mappings until everything was perfect”, explained Sandeep Jain, CEO of OpsHub.

Benefits of Choosing OpsHub

The migration to Azure DevOps Ultimate 2013 with Microsoft Test Manager was problem-free, and the team was able to get working with both very quickly.

Preservation is a key part of the migration from a legacy system. OpsHub expertly handled preserving our assets and process in addition to meeting our requirements for a smooth and speedy migration. By working with OpsHub to move our PeopleSoft testing to Azure DevOps we save about $80,000 per year in licensing and consulting cost.

Now that we have consolidated the entire organization onto Azure DevOps for testing we don’t have the costs and inefficiencies of maintaining competencies in multiple technologies.