ESTI Consulting Services - The IWA Prepares Technology for the Future

The IWA Prepares Technology for the Future

Keeping your systems up-to-date allows you to take advantage of the best solutions coming to market that will help you run your business.

The IWA - Forest Industry Pension Plan and IWA - Forest Industry LTD Plan ('Plan Office') recently completed a system wide upgrade to update their hardware, database and applications. They were able to take advantage of recently released yet proven technologies and incorporate these into a coherent system. In doing so, the Plan Office has reduced the risk of running on unsupported software, keeping with their long term planning goals, and further increasing the efficiency of their systems. ESTI was pleased to assist the Plan Office to integrate the key pieces of technology:

Servers running Windows 2003
Oracle 10gR2 Database
Oracle 10gR2 Application Server
Internet Explorer 7

IWA

The upgrade opens up new possibilities for the Plan Office. They now have the necessary components in place to benefit from:

A modern server operating system with current network features and security
Online software for use by members or employers
Support from Oracle to cover any potential future interoperability problems
Faster backup and recovery of critical data
New Oracle administration features that increase database and application monitoring capabilities

The success of an IT project is always dependant upon the people involved. Plan Office IT staff played key roles in getting everything up and running, as well as tackling the migration of two subsystems. When it was time for user acceptance testing, the majority of Plan Office staff were involved. This allowed everyone to get familiar with the new system before its release as well as letting the staff ensure that the components they work with on a day to day basis were properly tested.

10gR2 PALS in IE7

ESTI was able to use their experience in 10gR2 migrations to help set up the new environment and ensure a smooth transition. The use of ESTI built custom forms and reports migration tools reduced migration bugs while reducing overall costs. A separate ESTI Quality Assurance team was then engaged to validate and verify the accurate migration.

Project Team

Simon Gadd - ESTI, Principal Analyst, Project Manager
James Bohn - ESTI, Principal Analyst
Jeff Banow - ESTI, Technical Analyst, Quality Assurance
Ryan Gerstmar - ESTI, Technical Analyst, Quality Assurance
Daniel Simair - ESTI, Senior Analyst
Lawrence Cheng - ESTI, Analyst
Geoff Beauregard - ESTI, Analyst

Winny Wong - IWA, Manager, Information Systems
Bill Tkach - IWA, Systems Administrator
Richard Gaston - IWA, Programmer/Analyst
Greg Schmidt - IWA, Systems Support