Mission-critical legacy systems rewrite - boosted with customised PHP training

John Guest, one of the world's largest manufacturers of push-in fittings for the plumbing and engineering sectors, is heavily reliant on extensive legacy ERP systems - all maintained and developed by a very busy team of just four people. Today's challenge is to move systems built over the last 25 years to a rapid development platform, PHP, using existing resources. The company has selected Ibuildings to provide customised training and is delighted with early results.

The company runs machines 24 hours a day and manufactures a large range of products to sell (3,500 varieties protected by more than 100 patents). As a result, its manufacturing, materials and resource planning software is very sophisticated.

The legacy conundrum

The challenge facing John Guest will be familiar to lots of large organisations. Up to thirty years ago, companies that were large enough began writing highly bespoke applications for internal use. Over time, those applications have become central to everything the company does, with just a small team of dedicated people buried deep, maintaining and updating those systems. How to move to new database technologies, new infrastructure and development technologies while retaining the investment in highly successful, complex solutions?

The challenge for John Guest was compounded by their decision to use existing in-house resources to undertake the task. "That runs completely with the company philosophy," says Andrew Rumble, who heads up their web development team. "Right across the organisation we believe in performing as much as possible in-house. For example, we can more than compete with far-east manufacturing because we use very high tech automation, much of which is developed by our own engineers. We believe that this philosophy is the reason for our growth from a simple concept fifty years ago into what has become a world-beating operation."

John Guest's systems were originally developed in COBOL and the code they are currently converting was developed in PROGRESS. "We looked at a number of potential new platforms," Andrew explains, "but quickly settled on PHP, one of the most mature platforms that is ideal for heavyweight applications. It is much more visual than the languages we have used in the past. And a main driver, it offers all the benefits at significantly lower cost than some of the alternatives.".

The re-skilling challenge

With a team of just four people having to change their skill sets, while still maintaining existing systems, the re-training had to be fast and effective. "We had to find an organisation capable of helping us hit the ground running," says Andrew. "The reputation of Ibuildings in PHP is well known in the industry and their training goes beyond PHP to include software engineering principles and best practice. In fact, the clincher was the fact that Ibuildings' courses are delivered by experienced Zend Certified engineers; people with hands-on experience in developing complex web applications."

"So far, we have had sessions covering PHP essentials, Zend Framework and, just last week, Selenium. We will be adopting Zend Framework in earnest after the current project is completed - we were already some way along the line before we undertook the training - but we are already beginning to use Zend_Form and Zend Decorators."

"Within the current project, as coding comes to a close, we will be adopting Selenium for the testing phase. We particularly look forward to the user-perspective that Selenium offers; the ability to look around the site in a browser and record things for later playback."

"Ibuildings' approach to training is slightly unusual in that they begin with interviews and brainstorming to define their client's requirements. At first I questioned the need to spend time defining what I thought we already knew, but in practice it worked well and added real clarity."

"Their training approach fits us very well. In particular, we like the fact that each course doesn't run on tramlines; they are very happy to step outside as the need arises. They clearly want to help and they want to get involved, pointing us down the road to best practice – so critical in a major legacy migration."

"It may sound corny, but theirs really is very much a partnership process."

Now, can we help you?

Would you like to know how our customised training approach could help your team?

Call us on 020 3179 9555 or fill in our contact form to find out more.