Automation of Business Process by Optimization of Data Extraction and Loading

An Automobile industry is transitioning to a new electronic enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) environment using the WindchillPDMLink 10.0 application from Windchill 5.0. The development teams were using software called EIS, which does not have proper workflow. Even though new software exists the users were using the legacy EIS database. Data migration between EIS and WindchillPDMLink 10.0 has to be performed parallel. This involved a mechanism of downloading the data from EIS database and upload into Windchill database. In order to extract the data from EIS Database, SQL Scripting language is used .The data to be retrieved is specified in the script itself and then execution is carried out. The output obtained is saved as .csv file format and when this file gets executed in Windchill server, data gets loaded in the Windchill database. If the output obtained from EIS database exceeds the limit of character in SQL work sheet, then the remaining output gets stored in another .csv file. Complication starts while merging files. This data migration effort required considerably longer time than was expected due to an unexpectedly high percentage of errors in the extracted configurations. Although several iterations of extraction scripts were developed to reduce the number of errors, a significant percentage of configurations continued to display problems. Hence to optimize the data extraction methodology as well as to overcome the drawbacks of the EIS data extraction and loading, the system named as "Optimization of Data Extraction and Loading" is designed to improve quality and to reduce time of the data extraction and loading between databases.