Reducing Reporting Costs

M&A? Now in half the delivery time

The Business Challenge

When a telecom giant acquired an internet company, they decided to reduce cost by consolidating DataStage processes to Informatica.

The BI Challenge

Dealing with all the ins and outs of a merger or an acquisition can be overwhelming for any company, but it can be particularly so for BI groups consolidating multiple different systems or migrating from one system to another.

BI had to determine the following in order to conduct the most efficient and cost effective merger:

  • Which processes to migrate from DataStage to Informatica
  • Whether there are any ETL processes not being used by any reports that can be left out
  • Whether there are any processes that can be reused
  • The impact of deletion on certain processes
  • How any changes conflict with existing systems and the potential impact on day to day
    maintenance

How BI worked before Octopai

The BI group said they felt blind going into the migration. They had to go process by process to fully map DataStage in order to migrate the thousands of processes to Informatica. This task alone took them months of error-prone manual work and it was difficult for them to understand the impact of the changes they were making. Moreover, learning and understanding the different systems and logic behind them was very expensive.

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In this example Octopai discovered specific ETL processes being consumed by a report in use, and therefore should not be eliminated during an M&A. Within 5 seconds Octopai presents clear lineage which helps BI groups locate and understand any metadata they require.

  • Reports
  • DB tables
  • ETL Processes

BI groups are empowered by Octopai automation

Weeks into the migration, the project manager contacted Octopai for help in mapping which processes within DataStage were not being used in order to avoid having to migrate them. Within four hours Octopai was up and running and the BI group experienced a revolution in the way they worked. Octopai helped them map out all ETL systems and to discover obsolete processes within seconds. An impressive 46% of the processes discovered in DataStage were obsolete and were not migrated to the new BI environment – a huge savings of dozens of man months to the BI group who succeeded in shortening the cycle by half. Moreover, there were no production issues and the project was completed ahead of time.

Value to the Organization

  • Octopai helped the BI group map out all ETL systems and to discover obsolete processes within seconds
  • 46% of the processes discovered in DataStage were obsolete and were not migrated to the new BI environment – a huge savings of man months as the project was completed in half the time
  • Significant increase in the BI group’s accuracy
  • Huge savings of ongoing maintenance costs of unnecessary processes
  • Zero business disruptions or production issues during implementation