Background
The Union League Club of Chicago (ULCC) is a private city club which caters to a large network of members across Chicago and beyond. ULCC provides a complete suite of hospitality services, ranging from hosting business and social events to hosting guests for overnight stays to fine dining experiences, health and spa services, and various leisure facilities. With so many diverse services, the Club uses multiple systems to track membership data, room availability, scheduled events, inventory, etc. To extract, sync, and manage data and derive insights for analytical and reporting purposes, the ULCC needs a functioning ETL process to facilitate data transfers and synchronization among its information systems.
Use Case
The ULCC has three main systems that handle all of their incoming data. The first and most used of these is Northstar, which manages membership details, accounting, budgeting, events and catering, inventory, and more. Northstar uses a MySQL database to store all of this information. The data from Northstar is exported in CSV format and fed into the ULCC website, which is powered by the second system—ClubEssentials, a web development platform which manages member activity and data. Finally, the third system, ResortSuite, handles room reservations at ULCC.
All three systems work in tandem to provide a complete picture of membership and club data. This enables ULCC to make decisions based on data, which helps effectively manage resources, finances, services, and activities for an overall better member experience. In order to allow these three systems to communicate with each other, ULCC was using a data integration solution which allowed them to move and orchestrate data between the MySQL (used by Northstar) and Oracle (used by ResortSuite) databases. The solution additionally helped map specific tables from each system to keep all the information up to date and consistent.
However, this ETL solution had a steep learning curve for new users and high costs for product license renewal and tech support extension. Over the years, the costs of the ETL solution effectively tripled. Additionally, the solution had outdated functionality and lacked proper product documentation.
With Astera, we purchased a block of professional service hours and worked with a data specialist. We provided them with the original XML files (of the old product) and assisted them in ‘picking apart’ the dataflow and getting it operational. After a few calls, they understood how the dataflow should work, and we were able to create the dataflows and workflows from scratch. They attentively worked with us and our vendors during the testing phases to ultimately achieve the tasks at hand.
Enter Astera
The IT director at ULCC, Brian Williams, explored new options that would better fit the club’s needs. After a demo of Astera, Williams found that the product fit every single requirement.
Astera offers a high-performance, scalable data integration platform that allows businesses to meet today’s advanced data needs. Powered by an enterprise-grade, parallel processing engine, Astera offered ULCC data syncing, mapping, transformation, parsing, and extraction capabilities, all through a single platform.
Leveraging Astera’s workflow automation and job scheduling features, ULCC saw a stark reduction in the time spent executing, monitoring, and adjusting dataflows and workflows. The Club experienced a 70% decrease in the total time spent on creating synchronized database tables. Astera proved to be a cost-effective solution and also checked all of the boxes for an intuitive, user-friendly interface with workflow automation and job scheduling.
With Astera, we only spend half an hour a week to check if everything is running as it should, as compared to three to four hours a week previously, which also required making adjustments to the dataflows and workflows.