What do you do when a divestiture occurs??

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Tim Salaver
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    I have an issue that I'm trying to resolve which I don't believe is easy. My client is going through a divestiture of one of its companies so it needs to group 15 companies into 2 separate environments to their respective acquiring organizations. The expected result is to have a set of companies that appear completely separate as if they were always like that.

     

    I know I can't use any of the Lawson utilities because none of them separate the data by field. For instance, I want all of related company A's data to only go to new A PL and environment A and for related company B's data to only go to new B PL and environment B.  This will be done on the same server, so it is possible to only have 1 environment but separate the companies by PL.

     

    I believe this a UNIX script which performs a database export based on company field value = A and the load is an import script to load each corresponding table in the new environment.

     

    I appreciate any advice you may have, but I think this is god awful request because I also have to affirm that any inter-company set-ups are removed, too, as well as ensure that no remnants of the non-related company exist in the migrated target entities.  All set-up, transactions and history will be migrated.

    Thank you in advance,

    Tim Salaver

     

    John Henley
    Senior Member
    Posts: 3348
    Senior Member

      "God awful" is certainly a good way to describe this situation...Lawson does not have good facilities for acquisition/divestiture functions.  What I've done in the past, and which works pretty well, but is tedious and version-specific, is to use pgmdef to create "import-export" programs for each and every table, and then generate the code for each one.  In the resulting code, filter on which company is staying, etc. Then when you run the full set of programs, you end up with a set of data files that can be used with impexp to import into a new product line.  Obviously there are some additional things that have to happen, like object-ids, etc.   I have used this approach several times for both merging and divesting companies as well as when different product lines were used for different suites and needed to be merged together.  Check out this article, which Keri White wrote, that describes the approach https://www.danalytics.co...archive/2006-03.htm.

      Thanks for using the LawsonGuru.com forums!
      John
      Tim Salaver
      New Member
      Posts: 5
      New Member

        John, do you remember the character, Bill the Cat, from the Opus cartoon series.  His most memorable saying was "Ack!"  Okay so we all understand each other here, I need to migrate ALL the data from the GL/AP/AR/FB/CA/AC/TX/TE/BL modules.  I just found out that there are 29 companies to be grouped on 1 PL/ENV and 38 companies to be grouped in the other PL/ENV.  So I have a total of 67 companies to work with.  Based on your description, I need to create an export program for every table to extract 2 sets of companies and their respective set-up, transaction, and listing data.

        Hold on....I fainted and I can't get up.

        And how long do you think this will take?  I couldn't do this at the data layer with Sybase SQL queries?  I knew it was going to be bad, but didn't figure on it to be this complicated.  Someone get me a valium!!!

        Tim

        John Henley
        Senior Member
        Posts: 3348
        Senior Member
          I was just offering one approach which has been successful for me and my clients. I really don't think it's all that difficult, since you can just wrap the mapping logic in a library and keep referencing that code in the export programs. Creating the export programs takes just a couple of minutes per table.

          You can obviously do it with SQL queries; make sure you're INSERTing to new tables not doing in-place UPDATEs. In most cases the COMPANY will be a primary key, but there are some tables where it's a foreign key.

          You need to be careful about data integrity, particularly if there are intercompany transactions...what if one company charged to a company which is divested (and no longer exists in that PL??)

          Another idea to consider is using the Excel addins to dump / load the setup data to populate the new PLs and start fresh and just leave the "historical" PL there for reference...

          This is obviously something you will want to test a couple of times before doing it.
          Thanks for using the LawsonGuru.com forums!
          John
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