Boehringer Ingelheim: Secure High Volume Data Migration to FirstDoc

Challenge

In the pharmaceutical industry, modifications in operational procedure, business area changes or simply the integration of a new corporate acquisition often lead to massive adaptation costs. In order to simplify matters, many companies therefore move from highly customized Document Management Systems (DMS) to standardized systems like FirstDoc from CSC. This often implies a content migration of extremely large data volumes with complex structures and an extensive version history. A successful project of this kind at Boehringer Ingelheim demonstrates how this can be done with migration-center from fme.

For more than 13 years, Boehringer Ingelheim had been running a Documentum system tailored to its specific needs and containing more than 12 million submission relevant documents. All of these had to be migrated to a Documentum-based FirstDoc system. In the project, three major challenges had to be overcome:

• This very large document collection, originating from different company departments globally, had to be transferred safely and accurately to the new system, under full observance of all regulatory requirements and with an audit trail of the migration.
• The migration had to take into account specific and historically grown structures of different business areas, successfully map existing document attributes to the new FirstDoc requirements and reflect the needs of improved business processes.
• During the migration project’s 6-month-migration-duration, the old system would have to continue to be fully operational. All documents, including those created or modified during that interval, had to be available on day one of the new system.