By retiring five expensive legacy systems, RBF sought to streamline record keeping to improve information integrity, corporate accountability, and legislative compliance.

Restructure provides impetus for retiring costly legacy applications

Since 1904, the RBF Board has managed superannuation for Tasmanian public sector employees. Today, RBF provides wealth creation services to more than 75,000 members and manages a $5 billion in investments.

When RBF decided to outsource its superannuation administration processes to an external service provider in 2010, five in-house applications became redundant. While they were no longer required for operational purposes, the applications contained valuable member information, which would need to be captured and accessed in the future.

Solution

Migrating data and retiring legacy applications streamlines records management

RBF was already using Content Manager for its document management system.

“It made sense to explore the possibility of using it to manage our member records,” says Hill. “After consultation with … Kapish—the organization that helped us with our original implementation of Content Manager—we decided to go ahead with migrating the data and retiring five legacy applications.

“We had a highly customized software environment with a huge amount of data,” explains Hill. “This included 170,000 individual member files to capture approximately 500 GB of data, 600,000 PDFs, and some 9 million unique rows of data contained in 27 different tables. While we could export this information fairly easily, it was the import and management function we were really concerned about, given the inconsistencies in the file formats.”

To overcome these challenges, RBF drew on Kapish’s extensive experience with Content Manager. The team developed scripts to extract and import the data—PDFs, TIFFs, CSVs, and text files—into the desired structure. “This was the key to success for this project,” says Hill. “It cut considerable time off the planned migration timeframe, which we originally thought would be two years.”

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