Critical Data Migration with RPA

Transport for London’s track engineering team relied heavily on a legacy product register system that contained irreplaceable information about track products used throughout their network.

This decades-old system posed several critical challenges. The legacy system was becoming obsolete and was no longer supported or documented and they received regular alerts about discontinued functionality. Parts of the system had already stopped working, creating an urgent risk that Transport for London could lose all data without warning.

The documents weren’t stored as traditional files but needed to be recreated on-the-fly through user interactions. Each of the approximately 20,000 files required the system to mimic a complete user journey to generate and save the documents properly.

With over 20,000 business critical files requiring individual processing, manual data migration would have taken more than 2,000 hours of skilled engineering time – soul destroying work that would have been prone to human error and taken the equivalent of more than a one-person year.

Transport for London worked closely with Netcall to develop a replacement solution, built in Liberty Create and a sophisticated RPA solution using Liberty RPA that could handle the complex requirements of the legacy system migration keeping the impact on the business and public access minimal.

The Liberty RPA bots were programmed to replicate the exact user interactions required to access each document in the legacy system, generate the files on-the-fly and save them to the new Product Information Register application, with appropriate metadata.

The solution automatically captured and preserved critical reference numbers from the original system, ensuring that existing documentation and cross-references remained valid in the new Liberty Create application, something that was integral to reducing any impact to the public as well as internal processes.

Transport for London’s team conducted extensive process validation and testing to ensure the automation flows worked correctly. The systematic approach meant that when issues were identified, they could be fixed systematically across the entire dataset.

The RPA solution was deployed on dedicated virtual machines with full support from Netcall for setup and configuration, making the process seamless for Transport for London ‘s team despite being new territory for everyone involved.

Sample checking throughout the process identified and resolved systematic issues, ensuring high data quality. Once the process was proven correct, no further data transfer issues were encountered.

The data migration was completed in time for business validation, with track engineering colleagues able to verify that all data and documents were correctly transferred before the system went live.