Some years ago, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, a major aircraft manufacturer, implemented two large applications in MAPPER on their Unisys 2200 mainframe. These applications were critical to shop-floor manufacturing operations. In 1997, when McDonnell Douglas was acquired by Boeing, Boeing's managers wished to reduce data center costs associated with these legacy applications. Further, the Unisys 2200 no longer complied with new corporate directives for operating systems and hardware going forward.

Boeing decided to migrate the MAPPER applications to MAPPER C. Once converted, the MAPPER C applications, running on a Unix platform, had the promise of satisfying both military and commercial purposes. The newer, more modern hardware would also provide a substantial maintenance cost-savings to Boeing. Sequent was the winning bidder for this project, and chose FCI to perform the software and data migration.

However, before the project began, Sequent was acquired by IBM Corporation. So, FCI worked with IBM system administrators and Boeing database administrators to implement the migration. The scope of the project required FCI to accomplish the migration of two applications -- each with 1,300 programs and dozens of complex interfaces -- on two different hardware platforms for two different divisions. Meanwhile, the planned termination of the mainframe license dictated a highly aggressive deadline. 

FCI completed the migration work on time (within 10 calendar months) and under budget. The successful production cut-over for these systems was implemented on two back-to-back weekends in an 8-hour window each.

Due to the successful efforts of the FCI Team, Boeing saved millions of dollars over the next several years.

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