Consolidation of 16 KBs into a single one: the first step towards GeneXus X

Informat is a Chilean company that leads the way in the development of enterprise management solutions. Since it started operations -in 1974- it has successfully implemented more than one thousand solutions using state-of-the-art technologies for business management.

To perform the migration first they decided to consolidate, into a single Knowledge Base (in GeneXus 9.0), the product that had been developed using 16 Knowledge Bases (in GeneXus 7.0). Each KB represented a specific module of the ERP but many objects were duplicated in the various modules (and in many cases with significant differences between them).

To solve this problem, DVelop created several tools in .NET using GXPublic, which detected those duplicated objects and enabled Informat to decide what to do on a case-by-case basis and finally generate a new, consolidated KB based on the decisions made by Informat's team regarding each conflict.

Lastly, the project implied a stage that consisted of comparing the objects' navigation to make sure that the consolidated product behaved in the same way as did the original product. For this reason, DVelop traveled to Chile in order to provide training to the Informat team that would carry out this stage.

According to Rodrigo Cáceres, Research and Development Manager at Informat: "The project was a success, and without the high degree of automation (using the tools developed to this end) that DVelop found to solve each problem, it would have been extremely expensive. We want to highlight DVelop's professionalism and technical expertise to carry out a project with very specific characteristics, and their ability to adapt to our needs and requirements."