Primer
6.45 million yuan should be a big target for domestic heating enterprises to charge and customer service information software and hardware, and also a big project for charging software so far.
The project department immediately received the news of winning the bid. As the project implementation manager of this project, the feeling of joy was fleeting, and the responsibility that followed was heavy. But when I saw that the colleagues in the R&D department were all working hard, with high morale and confidence, I was relieved of most of them.
Calm down and check the basic data of Datong Thermal Power. It is learned that the network area of Datong Thermal Power is 72.6 million square meters, which is a national large first-class enterprise, with 10 heating branches, 1 maintenance and repair branch and 5 customer service points. By 2017, the company had laid a total of 875 kilometers of primary heating pipe network and 58.6 million square meters of central heating area for cogeneration. For more than a decade, 897 coal-fired heating boilers had been demolished and 698 chimneys had been pulled out, making outstanding contributions to the realization of "Datong Blue".
Recall that former sales colleagues also shared the information experience of Datong Thermal, as well as the whole process related to this bidding. Datong Heating has established an information management platform at an early stage in cooperation with a company in Beijing in charging and customer service software systems, and has a deep understanding of information management. However, with the change of heating policy and the innovation of information technology, the original management system has been unable to meet the growing management needs of thermal enterprises. In addition, the original system has not been upgraded for many years, the system is severely stuck, and the statistical report is inaccurate, which has greatly increased the workload of managers. In particular, the service provided by the original heating software supplier was not up to standard and timely. In many places, semi-automatic manual operation is required. For example, the software company needs to send someone to the site to carry forward the accounts manually for more than a week before charging for heating every year. In particular, statistics, one query for each time is two hours, and the findings are not accurate. Some words may be exaggerated, but from the side it also shows the strong appeal and dissatisfaction of the business department. It is a lesson from the past and a teacher for the future. I think we also learned from our peers to move forward at the beginning. Now the friend company has been unable to upgrade its own software, and can only completely overthrow and start again, which is the trigger for Datong Thermal to change software.
After a comprehensive review of the project, Datong Thermal has experienced a baptism of informatization, and the budget and standard of the software and hardware of the project are high, so it must put forward high requirements for us. In addition, the project is started early, and the company is usually very busy in September and October, so it needs to complete the online in three or four months, Stagger the company's project peak. I have preliminary plans for several project stages and human resources in mind, and I am ready to sort them out on paper and apply for support from the company leaders.
preparation in advance
According to the bidding requirements, the project was completed at the end of July and launched at the end of August. It is very reasonable for the customer to ask for an office on site because of the chaotic accounts and complicated business of the charging system he learned earlier. Therefore, one goal is to build a Datong office and conduct in-depth research on customer needs. Several things can be done now: 1 Determine project members; 2. Establish an office; 3. Organize the kick-off meeting.
Several important project roles have been identified within the company: project manager, charge implementation leader, data migration leader, customer service implementation leader, VMware virtualization implementation leader, performance testing, and the corresponding charge and customer service R&D team.
I clearly remember that one day after the Tomb Sweeping Day, a group of members took the necessities of life and set out on their own. It was more than 2 p.m. in Datong. In the afternoon, they completed the house rental, and in the evening, they completed the purchase of daily necessities. They checked in on the same day. The whole day was like a double grab in the countryside, full of harvest. This office is really suitable. You only need to walk through the underground garage to get to Datong Heating, which has provided great convenience for later research and service work, and the response is much more timely.
The two groups of members also arrived in Datong two days ago, everything is ready, and tomorrow we can arrange the project kick-off meeting.
Project launch
The project kick-off meeting must be held with as much publicity as possible. Otherwise, who knows what your project manager is, who knows you and who treats you. Just like the appointment of generals before the ancient war, there must be a ceremony, but the organization, form and appointment of the project kick-off meeting are almost all promoted by the project party. That is to say, we should seize this opportunity to promote ourselves and avoid being passive in the process of future project promotion. Informatization work is inherently difficult. It is very important to use the details of each link to accumulate trust between both sides. With trust, we can face and solve the biggest difficulties together. Without trust, a small problem can be caught and lead to total loss. Therefore, in the whole project implementation process, building trust has always been an important position for me.
On April 7, 2017, at 8:10 a.m., the kick-off meeting of heating charge and customer service informatization project was officially held. A total of 10 people attended, with more participants from Datong Heating. President Wang led the team, Manager Xu of the Customer Service Department, Director Zhang of the Customer Service Department, Director Zhang of the Toll Collection Department, Director Zhang of the Network Information Department, Chief Financial Officer Li, and core management personnel of charge and customer service also participated.
The content of the kick-off meeting was not important, but the project teams of both sides met and understood. The leadership of Datong Thermal Power expressed their determination to promote informatization, authorized the project manager and project team members, and let everyone actively cooperate with the demand research and project implementation of toll software. I also elaborately made a PPT to publicize and implement the relevant implementation tasks, plans and requirements of the project to all project team members of Party A, so that everyone can be clear about the work to be done in the future and be mentally prepared.
The kick-off meeting was relatively smooth. I could feel the importance of Party A's leadership, the urgency of the business department's demands for the new system, and the support signal from the network department. Later, after the kick-off meeting, I helped us adjust the network environment of the temporary office, and we were directly stationed.
Demand collision
After the kick-off meeting, the project research will start. Party A has arranged the office chair, power supply and network for us on the first floor, and we can start work there. This is efficient! Opposite this office is the office of Director Zhang in charge of charge, Director Zhang in charge of customer service, and Manager Xu in the customer service department. They work together. We are on call, and they are also on call. People can come here with a little shout for communication.
The three directors came over for a chat, and they remembered three words. One is that they can always actively accompany them when working overtime at night or on holidays. The second is that Director Xu repeatedly said that cooperation is a family. The third is that Director Zhang asked the project manager that you will not leave. I can understand the meaning of these three sentences. Director Zhang explained that people from the previous software company came here, and he also asked this sentence. They said no, and they said they would take the problem back to the company to solve it. As a result, they never saw it again after returning to Beijing.
It took two days to communicate the requirements. As it was a communication, it was necessary to make a comprehensive functional analysis of the original system of Datong Thermal. Director Zhang is really a dedicated person, and he took the trouble to introduce us again and again, for fear that we might not understand or miss, which laid a solid foundation for the subsequent development and design. At the end of each day, due to the large amount of information, we have to summarize the information of the day and discuss key issues. In general, Datong thermal customers have a great cooperation, and the communication staff have a strong sense of responsibility and enthusiasm. Everyone adheres to the idea of exposing problems and solving problems as soon as possible, actively promotes the project progress, and does not let problems hide until the project goes online. I also got a lot of user stories from customers, which are very valuable.
data migration
On April 10, the second week of project implementation, the colleagues in charge of data migration began to be stationed. Datong Thermal's customer base data is about 600000, and the historical data of 7 years constitute a large amount of data since I started the project, so we attach great importance to data.
One step of data migration is data analysis, which is also an important step. As we continue to deepen our data analysis, we find that the data migration work of Datong Thermal is much more complex than we thought. This complexity is not the huge data magnitude mentioned above, but the non-standard data. We learned that some functions of the original charging system in the application process can not meet the business needs, so people who operate the software often use an unconventional operation to achieve a certain business, such as directly modifying the heating fee receivable if the recovery cannot be achieved after the suspension is reported, directly modifying the standing book if the area settlement is not correct, and Director Zhang also said that, Sometimes a problem occurs in the system and needs to be handled by the original software company. The engineer does not fix the problem but directly changes the value in the background. This is to treat the symptoms rather than the root cause. As a result, many data areas and receivables are not in line with each other, and the current year is not in line with previous years. We joke that the system has been damaged by you.
The data migration went on continuously. This huge project lasted more than four months. We were like a cruise in the ocean of data. From time to time, we salvaged some problem data for the business department to verify and modify. Later, we checked the new account and the old account and found that there was a difference of more than 1 yuan. I still remember Director Zhang jokingly said: "This is more than 1 yuan, I will take it!"! In fact, in the scope of data migration, it is difficult to avoid errors. Besides, it is not easy for us to check the amount of more than one billion yuan to the difference of one yuan! I only remember that we were very happy and even excited that day.
Hardware admission
The hardware part of Datong Thermal Power is also a highlight. The entire platform involves many hardware and is deployed in the way of VMware virtualization, including servers, firewalls, switching equipment, office computers, beat meters, printers, all-in-one computers, televisions, etc. One of the core switches is worth 200000 yuan, which really refreshes my three perspectives.
On May 18, the core server hardware arrived. Our hardware engineers had arrived two days earlier and waited. In the afternoon, we pulled the hardware into the computer room under the guidance of the Information Department. The machine room of Datong Thermal Power is very professional. The outer room is the monitoring room, the inner room is the hardware equipment, and the middle is a large glass wall. The temperature and moderation of the machine room can be easily seen through the glass. The door of the computer room is identified by fingerprint, and only the personnel of the information department can enter and exit. After entering the computer room, there were 12 cabinets in order, and the wiring was neat and not messy. We and our brothers at the information office put the server on the shelf, and then we went on wiring.
There are 5 servers in this project, each server has 8 gigabit ports and 2 10 gigabit ports, that is to say, each server needs 8 network cables and 2 optical fibers. Fortunately, all of them are finished lines, which saves the time of making lines by ourselves, and also ensures the quality of the lines. However, a total of 40 network lines and 10 optical fibers, plus the connection with the switching equipment, are not simple things to walk in the cabinet orderly and look comfortable. We have been doing it for nearly a day, but we have not been able to complete it.
I continued to work in the next day. With the deployment of VMware virtualization, I had a total of 10 days. Looking at the neat computer rooms and fast running servers, I still felt a sense of achievement. So far, 400 mobile phones have not arrived in the hardware part. I think I will take a picture after the goods are delivered. It is also spectacular to have 400 mobile phones on the table and install the paid mobile app at the same time!
Install Deployment
After the hardware is installed, the next step is the software installation and deployment.
On May 24, I informed our implementation engineers to start the system deployment. Although some virtualization work has not been completed yet, I decided to proceed in parallel, because functional testing, performance testing, system tuning and other work can only be carried out after the software deployment is completed.
We have also spent a lot of time on the system deployment of Datong Thermal Power. The entire platform has made a complete set of deployment plans considering speed and security. The environment is deployed in the way of VMware virtualization. Five servers form a virtualized private cloud platform, allowing any two servers to fail without affecting the use of the system. Each server is equipped with six 1.2T enterprise hard disks, five of which are interconnected with other servers through 10GbE optical fibers to form a disk storage pool, In addition, two 400G high-speed solid state disks are equipped as cache disks to improve data reading and writing efficiency. For software deployment, we use the tomcat cluster and load balancing deployment mode. Whether it is a toll system or a customer service system, Apache is used as the cluster manager for each service, and multiple Tomcat servers are built under it. This can ensure the stability and security of the system operation, and can also be switched without feeling when the system is updated and upgraded.
By the middle of June, we had built 8 virtual servers and 100 virtual desktops on the virtual machine. Four of the eight virtual servers are bank front-end computers, and the other four are application servers, which are respectively the application server of the charging system, the application server of the customer service system, the database server, and a standby server. The next step is to install the virtual desktop. We spent some energy on this link. Yes, yes, it's physical strength!
Datong Heating has 4 business halls and 10 branches scattered in the southeast, northwest and northwest of the city. Four business halls are under the management of the head office, which are respectively Xicheng, Nancheng, Beicheng and Huadu business halls. Each business hall has 6-8 toll computers. Each computer needs to install a virtual desktop to log in to the system, and the operating system needs to be redone in case of computers that cannot be installed. In addition, each branch company needs to have 1-2 computers to use the system, the computer department, the financial department, etc., so we need to install about 80 remote desktops. At that time, there were only 3 people on the site, which was the biggest when we thought about it. Fortunately, the brothers at the information office of Datong Heat helped us a lot, and Director Xu arranged vehicles for us, so that we would not be exhausted in the battlefield.
