Background
This company is a consulting firm specializing in developing web
applications for non profit associations. They develop solutions for clients revolving around a partner company’s
netFORUM applications. Part of many
of their projects involves migrating the client’s existing CRM data to netFORUM
systems. This often involves tens of
thousands of records.
What was their situation / problem?
With no two clients’ database schemas the same, developers at this firm would
have to write custom SQL scripts for each client CRM database backup they
received. For their customers that
gave them data in spreadsheets, the process was even worse due to the
intermediate step of importing the spreadsheet into a staging database first. This was not a repeatable process and
was generally time consuming due to a disconnect between SQL scripts and the
business users who knew the data best.
Requirements
They needed a repeatable transfer process that was self documenting. They needed something that could
match or exceed the speed in which they would write the custom SQL scripts and
at the same time, would serve to document the mapping so the client could see
that they were getting what they paid for.
Solution
Being a consulting shop, they could have developed their own robust
transformation engine, but quickly decided against it as they were not in the
data integration business and their resources would be better utilized by
working on client projects rather than invent something that was probably out
there in the market already. They
ultimately settled on Astera’s product line.
Using Astera Software’s data transformation products, they was able to
create custom transformations quickly and transparently. With Centerprise’s drag-n-drop visual
mapping, it was a cinch to completely map customer data in minutes. And with the mapping being a visual
representation, it was easy to present to their clients and thus served to
document the process as well.
Due to ease of use and extensive logging abilities of Centerprise,
this consulting firm estimates that they were able
to speed up the process of mapping customer data by 20%. So in only a few projects, Centerprise
was able to pay for itself.