Optim™ for Lawson
Data Archiving
Healthcare Indusrty
Client Background
At its founding in 1968, Nashville-based client was one of the nation's first hospital companies. Today, it is the nation's leading provider of healthcare services, a company comprised of locally managed facilities that includes about 164 hospitals and 106 freestanding surgery centers in 20 states and Great Britain and employing approximately 183,000 people. Nearly five percent of all inpatient care delivered in the country today is provided by the client's facilities.
Customer Problem
The rapid growth of the client's database began to impair its ability to efficiently manage it. Backups continued to take longer, as well as the propagation of these large databases to the test environments. The client knew the reduction in the size of the database would allow for overall savings of the time to manage these databases. In turn, backups will run quicker, and restores will be easier to perform with less disk space issues. The business case was to enhance system performance as well as ease the day-to-day operations involved with managing the rapidly growing database.
BTRG's Solution
An Optim partner since 2005, BTRG has implemented Optim for hundreds of applications. Leveraging this expertise, only a single resource was needed to complete the project as well as an engagement manager to ensure success at the project management level. This allowed BTRG to maximize its time spent on the project saving the client both time and money.
Customer ROI
- Lawson performing at its optimal performance - there are millions of historical transactional rows that have now been moved from the production database to the reporting database, relieving processing pressures on the system.
- The client is self-sufficient ensuring internal ongoing support with Optim due to training provided by BTRG
The first step was to analyze the relationships at the database table level and to understand how BTRG can archive (delete) rows from the database without impacting the client's day-to-day operations. It was important to identify the data being frequently accessed as well as not cause orphan rows in order to maintain continuity of daily business operations. Using SQL and delivered Lawson tools, BTRG was able to identify the relationships between these tables ensuring their referential integrity was kept intact for daily business and reporting purposes.
Optim on z/OS was used to build the relationships, extract the data, delete the data and finally insert it to a separate database for reporting on, if necessary. BTRG was able to leverage its expertise with Lawson to reduce the overall project time to 10 weeks. Utilizing past experiences with the tables allowed BTRG to reflect on prior engagements, allowing for quicker decision-making, yielding faster results and saving the client both time and money.
BTRG provided the client's project team training with knowledge transfer, enablement, as well as product training. It is important the client is able to perform all the tasks created and be able to provide support going forward. Having an understanding of the product, and the approach taken for this project will allow the client to reap the rewards from its investment when beginning its next archiving project. Extra knowledge was provided to give insight into how powerful the IBM Optim tool is and how to maximize the asset.
For more information contact:
Ian Wight
Sales Executive
Information Management Solutions
BTRG, Inc.
(716) 861-7245 or iwight@btrgroup.com
