Oracle and Bull help construction firm with on-site workflows

City Building Glasgow (CBG), a construction firm, has completed a project to integrate two key applications and enable staff to receive live updates on tasks while off site.

The firm has deployed the Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture suite to integrate its repairs and maintenance application and Glasgow Housing Association's (GHA) housing application.

The GHA is one of the CBG's largest repairs and maintenance clients.

Now, when a tradesperson updates their PDA out on a job, this feeds through to a repairs and maintenance application that instantly updates GHA's housing application. This streamlines the process of managing more than 4,000 repairs a week and ensures that all parties are working with the most up-to-date information.

This is the most recent tranche of a major investment in a new IT infrastructure with IT services provider Bull, which was fully built and configured off site prior to implementation.

Angela Murphy, head of IT at CBG, believes that this off-site configuration was key to the success of the project. She explained that her team visited Bull’s site once the system had been built to check that it was operating as specified.

“That meant my staff weren't involved in the implementation until it was ready for handover, and so it saved them time,” said Murphy. “It also meant we could see that everything was on track.”

She added that the tendering process had come down to Bull and Computacenter, with the Bull offering being both cheaper and less complex. Building the solution on its own site first minimised the time Bull needed to spend in the final implementation, enabling the company to cut costs too.

“That’s how Bull was able to be so competitive on price,” said Murphy. “It also meant that the implementation was quick, since the infrastructure had been built and proven once already.”

The project came about when CBG realised that its hardware was outdated and lacking in resiliency, and that its primary database was slow.

“The new hardware would not support an older database, so we had to upgrade both the hardware and the application at the same time,” said Murphy.

The project was critical to the organisation, and for ease of management CBG wanted to work with only one supplier. For this reason, it looked at suppliers that were able to offer the right hardware, but also to be able to deliver the Oracle software installation at the same time.

“We moved from Oracle 734 up to 10g,” stated Murphy. “We didn’t go for [newer product] Oracle 11g – it was too complex for the transition."

Since CBG was upgrading hardware, it wanted resilience to be built in. Murphy wanted Oracle dataguard to be run between CBG’s on-site servers and its remote site.

Bull built the new infrastructure based on NovaScale application servers running Windows 2003, and Escala servers running AIX to host the Oracle database, connected to EMC CLARiiON storage devices and an Overland tape library for backup.

As Bull NovaScale servers have been designed to deliver scalable performance to small- and medium-size businesses, while Escala servers are designed for mission-critical applications running on AIX, this combination was a good match to satisfy CBG’s requirements.

CBG’s staff are now able to capture and transfer data out in the field on PDAs, in real-time. This enables the company to improve the management of jobs and accommodate any emergency demand for repairs by reorganising personnel while out on jobs.

And although flexibility was important to CBG, the fact that the project was finished on time and on budget has been more key to the project being considered a success.

“And this was enabled by the build and configuration being done off site,” concluded Murphy.