1st Advantage Federal Credit Union (FCU), one of the largest financial institutions in the US, has implemented InterSystems` Cach'e database to boost its response times, reduce costs and improve operations.
In 1999 the company`s transaction volume was 500 000 per month, a figure that has increased by 40% to 700 000.
"Before Cach'e we suspected that our problem was either with our hardware which seemed to be grossly undersold, or there was something seriously wrong with our software configuration," says Carrie Todd, chief technical officer at 1st Advantage FCU. "That was when we decided to employ a better database to solve our problem."
1st Advantage FCU, formerly known as Fort Eustis Federal Credit Union, has grown into an organisation with assets of $300 million and approximately 60 000 members located in 50 American states and 27 foreign countries. It provides a wide range of financial services, including investments, debt management and free monthly information services.
The company had been facing a crisis. Its staff was working nights to retrieve data from the credit union`s new Compaq server, a laborious process that involved extracting the data from the host system, copying it to the operating system level, transferring it over to a PC, delimiting the data, and then importing it into a spreadsheet. With a failing server employees at 1st Advantage were working through the night to carry out business processes.
This affected the business flow as bank tellers could not open for morning business, which in turn caused long lines of unhappy customers outside the branch offices. The company was eventually faced with an unplanned purchase of an additional server to solve its problem, but the solution did not solve its problems.
The expense and delays put at risk the company`s plans to expand transactional input points for its Newport News-based business. In an effort to cut costs, 1st Advantage brought in InterSystems and US vendor USERS, to help solve the dilemma.
"In the past, all our non-essential personnel were instructed to stay off the network on the first day of each month, so that the system could run a three-hour payroll feed from the Federal Reserve," says Todd. "It now takes just an hour-and-a-half to run the same reports, which means that our users are no longer losing a full day on the network."
According to 1st Advantage, with proper database management businesses can minimise their storage requirements. Cach'e uses an efficient multidimensional data model that eliminates the need for two-dimensional tables.
"This model makes it possible for businesses to access data and perform updates with fewer disks I/O, which in turn speeds the application," says Henry Adams, country manager for InterSystems South Africa.
"This approach allows virtually any kind of business to put the database to work, including conglomerates like Ameritrade, which processes 88 000 trades each day and accounts for 1.8 million customers."
It took 1st Advantage only two months and $30 000 to integrate the Cach'e database into the information system. The company has streamlined the process of extracting data from the database with the use of SQL queries in the DataSafe/SQL information system powered by Cach'e. It cut a 14-hour job in half with the installation of Cach'e and now the SQL queries can extract the data in a mere 20 minutes, and users can run their own reports.
"The integration has paid off with more than money for 1st Advantage," says Adams. "In addition to the time-savings and user benefits, the company is running on the same Compaq database server while continuing to add members, employees, and a host of new back-office functions including online banking, debit card transactions, and more ATMs."
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