Re: External Data Areas - Multiple Companies, One Program

On 2/8/2019 8:24 AM, Denis Robitaille wrote:

We were in the same situation several years ago (over 20).

We switch to a model where we use the library list and all files/data area have the same name regardless of the company. Works like a charm. We had to do this when the number of company got so high that we could not create distinct names (A.xxx, B.xxx all the way to Z.xxx. We even used some special caracters).

I would strongly recommend switching to this method. It has several advantages:
- All object for a company are grouped together
- Easier if you want to do things like backup at different time depending on the company
- When a new company is created, no change in the code is required, just create a new library populated with the files that have the same name for all companies

I'm sorry if this sounds like boasting, because I don't mean it to be, but this is exactly what I did for a client I had in the 1990s. They had an insurance application (third party administration) that was only set up to handle one company.  The president of the insurance company (a subsidiary of a larger company) was under pressure to get more clients.  He said he couldn't get more clients until the application was modified to handle multiple companies. The young hotshot pseudo-CIO of the parent company said it couldn't be done for less than $500,000 (mid 1990s dollars.)  The president of the subsidiary was eventually fired for his failure to land other clients.  Not long thereafter, the CFO of the parent company asked me to take a look at what it would take to make the subsidiary's application multi-company capable.  I proposed a multi-library (mostly for the database) solution, and said I could do it for $50,000.  In the end, I and another contractor whom I engaged did it for about $35,000 in billable time, and the third party administrator eventually had three clients.  They ran it for years, from 1998 to 2014, when the TPA dissolved.