When your Great Application succeeds in supplementing an older application there is always the problem of transforming the Customers's DB into your 
New Format, aka Conversion or Data Migration.
Usually - for each project, for each table it is necessary to write a conversion program - meaning lots of (usually mechanical) work for programmers.
The Generic Engine enables non-programmers to write 'definition files' that define how each output field should be built, so that system analysts - who know the business but cannot program - can 'skip' the phase of explaining to the programmer what should be done, and do it themselves.
The presentation is in two levels:
1) Functionality (how the user sees the system)
2) Highlights of Perl code, showing how easy it is to  do things in Perl. among other things:
the power of dynamic hash structures
use of anonymous functions
references
closures
evals
etc.
In short: how the combination of many of Pel goodies allow to build a generic application.