Over the past four decades, IT staff at Bayer have developed many custom applications to help the firm’s managers, engineers, and plant operators to solve problems specific to the business. However, these applications were developed in the days of DOS; being command-line driven, they were very difficult to use, especially for younger employees accustomed to more modern graphical user interfaces.
“The text-based interface required the user to get the syntax exactly right,” says Ed Casanova, Manufacturing Technologist for Bayer. “If a user typed an incorrect character or a character in the incorrect location, an unhelpful error message would appear. The user typically had to start over, trying to figure out what they had done wrong. Even more serious was the risk that data might be entered incorrectly – the program would run, but return the wrong results.”
Managers considered out-sourcing a rewrite of the applications but rejected the idea because each application would have cost anywhere from $20,000 to more than $100,000. Not only that, the rewritten applications would have required a lengthy revalidation and testing phase, which would have been prohibitive.
