Migration of an ERP system to Delphi 10.1

Description

Our client is a spare parts manufacturer supplying a wide range of European car brands with auto parts. By the time the company contacted us, they were using an ERP system built over 30 years ago. It was a large mature product written in Pascal with the help of the free Pascal Compiler. However, they couldn’t keep the product updated efficiently because their in-house development team had very few specialists who had enough skills of working with Pascal.

The client had already built a modern UI using Winforms but they needed someone’s help to migrate the software storage and business logic to modern technologies.

The ERP system covers all stages of the auto spare parts manufacturing processes starting from setting a task by the business department based on the received orders and ending up with shipping orders to end-users.

All departments, all specialists have access to the system via their workplaces (some of them through touchscreens). They get their tasks via this software, indicate the fulfilled tasks and set the requirements for those specialists who will work on this order further.

Client`s pain and concern

The existing ERP system doesn’t meet increased performance and scalability requirements.

Our developers have built modern UI but we need help to migrate databases and business logic.

The maintenance of the existing software is getting more and more expensive every year.

Project Team size

2 Delphi developers
Software developer
BA specialist
QA specialist

Solutions

The ERP system covers many standard business processes being integrated with the equipment and machinery. The main difficulty in the project was to migrate a large database.

We built new database architecture on PostgreSQL and integrated it with the ERP software. It was quite labor-intensive, but we coped with this task.

As we had over 800 forms for migration, we decided to organize our work step by step.

The core modules were migrated in the first turn and then the migration was conducted in accordance with the priority set by the client.

All the work was divided into 8 parts (approximately 100 forms were migrated within each sprint).

After each sprint, a newly migrated part of the system was released and implemented.

Based on the existing requirements, we chose Delphi 10.1 for migration which was the latest Delphi version at the time when we worked on this project.

Technologies

used in the project

Delphi 7
PostgreSQL 14

Outcome

The ERP was successfully migrated to Delphi 10.1. All the features stay fully functional and we also ensured the possibility for the client’s in-house development team to scale the product and to add new features on their own without the necessity to involve external specialists in this process.

We managed to efficiently organize the migration which allowed us not to interfere in the working process of the enterprise and not to stop the production lines.

Our client has got a modern ERP system that meets all the current requirements and can be easily maintained and scaled by their in-house team.