Cadbury

The Challenge:

It’s true to say that Legacy Systems can sometimes do the best job but it’s also true to say that supporting them can sometimes proves to be a nightmare. Cadbury Schweppes had invested a great deal of time, effort an intellectual capital into creating and implementing their business models into Holos for their decision support operation. A 3rd party solution based on an Oracle platform Holos stores data models in unique data structures called cubes which were well matched to the companies needs – but far less so when the original developer was acquired and the plug pulled on the product.

This placed Cadbury’s in a difficult situation, most of their expertise had moved on, the system was stable but.. no longer supported and migration, in the short term, was highly problematic. They needed a partner who could work closely with them to manage the service cost effectively, securely and if needed, over the medium to long term whilst an effective migration path was pursued.

The Critical Success Factors:

The service profile required, to meet these needs, had to be highly flexible, responsive and adaptable but not only this.. the entree required a goodly amount of reverse engineering logic to be applied to understand the models and structures sufficiently to meet stringent SLA requirements. All of which presented a high degree of risk to Cadbury’s so they needed an organisation who they could trust and who would provide a measured, cost-effective model for operating the service.

The Solution:

CWEB analysed the requirements and offered a dedicated Help Desk service together with the potential to enhance existing services both to sustain user confidence and add-value where appropriate. Both during the initial transfer phase and subsequent live running the team have continued to receive the complements of and accolades for response above and beyond the nature of our agreement. All of which has enabled Cadbury to relax and continue to derive considerable benefit from a service which, at one point, they felt had placed them between a rock and a hard place.