Optim™ for Lawson
Test Data Management & Data Privacy
Chemical Company
Client Background
Our client—a $4.3B corporation with over 4,400 employees—is a leading chemical distributor in the United States, providing more chemical products and related services than any other firm in the marketplace. Their core business focuses on industrial chemicals which provides products and services to a variety of industries including; chemical compounding, energy, food, personal care, pharmaceutical, waste management and water treatment.
Managing multiple test environments, refreshed weekly from production, for their Lawson system began to raise privacy concerns brought on by recent legislation. As a result, a mandate came down to hide employee personal data—such as social security numbers, salary information, direct deposit account numbers, etc—from those doing the testing.
Having a data archiving, sub-setting, masking, decommissioning and purging strategy will:
- Repurpose current infra and staff
- Reduce current infra and staff
- Avoid increases in infra and staff
- Avoid compliance and litigation penalties.
- Avoid negative business sales revenue impacts.
Storage reduction costs
- Reduced software license costs
(cpu mips etc)
- Reduced hardware costs.
- Reduced data center costs.
- Reduced power costs.
- Reduced productivity costs
(system downtime, performance,
maintenance)
- Reduced lost business
(system downtime, system performance)
The Technical Challenge
The multiple testing environments in which you store sensitive customer data need to meet data privacy legislation requirements. BTRG was retained by our client to implement our data privacy and test data management solution using IBM's Optim™ product.
This particular client's ERP system happens to be Lawson—and because they were not in possession of an entity relationship diagram BTRG's Optim™ expert had to first identify and define the database relationships and keys in order to be able to configure the optimal solution. As a result, BTRG has developed a pre-configured set of access definitions that it can deploy to reduce the costs of future Optim™ projects where Lawson is the subject of the archive, test data management or data privacy solution. The test data management project took 10 weeks and required only one, senior BTRG Optim™ expert.
Lawson Data Archiving Solution
Upon completion of the test data management project, our client requested that we configure an archiving solution for them that they could use to archive their Lawson Payroll and GL systems every year. Already familiar with their systems, the same BTRG consultant stayed on for an additional 3 weeks to configure an archiving solution and train the client on the archive, the restore and the delete process. As a result, there have been noticeable - but unmeasured - performance improvements.
For more information contact:
Ian Wight
Sales Executive
Information Management Solutions
BTRG, Inc.
(716) 861-7245 or iwight@btrgroup.com
