A leading automotive manufacturer has been a MIC customer for 20 years. As one of the global player in this industry, with brands and manufacturing facilities all over the world, the company needs a customs partner that can make its complex global supply chains as easy to manage as possible.
While the on-premises Global Trade Management solution provided by MIC has proved reliable and successful, innovation never stands still. The company wanted to ensure it was adopting the most modern technology with an emphasis on agility, scalability and resilience. Therefore, a migration from on-premises to the cloud was chosen as a strategic initiative to accelerate innovation and enable future adoption of solutions such as MIC AI tools.
With such a large, globally-distributed environment this was always going to be a highly complex project. Major challenges included:
- A massive database for migration
- A global footprint across many countries and time zones
- A large and diverse user base
- A highly complex customs integration environment with numerous interfaces
- The need for minimal downtime during the migration
With strong technology, good planning and effective collaboration between teams from MIC, the customer and Oracle, the rollout was highly successful. Here's what we did.
The need for a smooth cloud migration
In recent years, the customer has made a cloud-first, AI-driven approach the cornerstone of its IT strategy. The brand has a strong focus on leveraging the latest technologies to drive innovation, efficiency and business agility. A more modern, SaaS-based Global Trade Management system was an essential part of this. However, the migration of such a large database was a major undertaking.
With 45 TB of data to transfer and more than 3,000 users around the world, the scale of the task was immense. As well as extremely large data sets, the company processes huge volumes of transaction volumes daily. The need to migrate so much data without impacting operations and while ensuring data integrity made the project both technically demanding and time-sensitive.
Key priorities for the migration were:
- Smooth transition: The company required a seamless migration process that avoided disruptions to existing operations.
- Minimal downtime: Maintaining continuous worldwide business operations was a strict precondition, as any downtime would be hugely disruptive. This meant switching from the old system to the new with no break in service.
- Complex data integration: The customer relies on numerous external data sources and has users in multiple time zones, all of which had to be migrated while ensuring integrity and accessibility.
- Timely operations across time zones: The company maintains direct contact with customs authorities in several countries, including Mexico, the US, Korea and Canada. This requires close synchronization across global teams to ensure compliance and operational accuracy.
- Specialized workflow coordination: Certain specialized workflows occur at predefined times and require precise execution. The migration needed to support these without interruption.
Ultimately, this was far from just a technical upgrade. It was a highly orchestrated, time-sensitive operation to maintain compliance, support global operations and minimize business disruption, while ensuring the customer’s global trade platform was fit for the future.
Our choice of tools: Oracle Database Migration Service
MIC's Kubernetes-based SaaS platform ticked all the boxes for the customer's requirements for high availability, automation, a centralized support offering and global reach. With 99.7 percent uptime and a proven track record that can reduce support tickets by up to 30 percent, the solution offers the scalability and stability required.
For the migration itself, we turned to Oracle's Database Migration Service (DMS). While it was initially uncertain whether the platform could handle such a large-scale migration with near-zero downtime, extensive simulations and testing were conducted in advance to confirm it would work as intended.
One of the main complexities was managing the consistency of mission-critical data across geographically distributed systems. However, by conducting joint technical workshops with the customer, Oracle and our team, specialists performed assessments, established validation checkpoints and introduced automated synchronization scripts.
This approach allowed us to anticipate potential bottlenecks, address data integrity concerns and ensure all stakeholders had clear visibility into each step.
Collaboration was key throughout the process, with teams from the customer, MIC and Oracle meeting regularly to test scenarios, plan for any eventualities and coordinate timelines and responsibilities. In total, more than 100 MIC team members and 40 employees on the customers side worked on the project, with support from Oracle's experts.
Wilfred Scholman, Vice President, ISV, Oracle EMEA noted that the migration was "remarkable in its scale, complexity and business importance", making it a benchmark for such projects and demonstrating the power of the DMS platform for even the largest, most complex projects.
How we ensured a smooth rollout
The planning phase for the migration took less than a year, which involved extensive testing and dry runs to validate the new environment and ensure data integrity. This allowed assessment of every eventuality so that when the final go-live took place, the transition from the old environment to the new was as fast and seamless as possible.
With resources around the world, we adopted a 'follow-the-sun' principle to ensure the migration project was progressing 24/7. Stakeholders including MIC's Infrastructure and Operations Platform team and stakeholders across the world were on call around the clock, monitoring activities and addressing any issues.
Key milestones along the way included:
- Test systems set up within a month of contract sign-off.
- 45 TB of data migrated into test environments over two months via export, transfer, and import.
- Final database migration using Oracle Data Migration Service.
- Production cutover from old system to new. The primary transfer was completed in just seven minutes, while the full task - including configuration, smoke testing and activation of all interfaces and batch processing - was finalized in only seven hours.
After the successful, on-time go-live, we maintained full 24/7 support in the following days and weeks to ensure stability and address any issues in production. Throughout this, the system remained fully operational at all times with no downtime for users - signaling a highly successful rollout.
What happened next? The business impact of the migration
Following the migration, the MIC trade management system supports more than $130 billion worth of global trade, including vehicles and parts. As a truly global solution, it's used by more than 3,000 of the company's employees across four continents. Meanwhile, direct integrations with customs authorities in the US, Canada, Mexico and South Korea ensure streamlined reporting for the company's imports and exports.
Key benefits, capabilities and firsts introduced through the migration include:
- First use of Oracle DMS by MIC to enable Zero Downtime Migration
- Implementation of multi-factor authentication for login
- Adoption of Argo Workflows as a new scheduling tool
- Enhanced monitoring and alerting in Grafana
- A new configuration tool
- Customs integrations across 57 systems, 600 interfaces and more than 1,200 jobs
- 3,183 users across eight countries: US, CA, MX, KR, BR, AR, AU, AE
A project stakeholder: "The MIC team's role in migrating the GTM solution from on-premises to MIC SaaS stands out as a model of effective collaboration and technical excellence. From the initial contract negotiations through to the final cutover, the process was marked by a strong sense of partnership and shared purpose.
"This achievement not only reflects the MIC team's technical capabilities but also their commitment to building trust and delivering results in a complex, high-stakes environment."
