Following a successful engagement to address issues with the existing service Acuma were invited to undertake a project to address further, the performance, operational aspects, scalability and some functional improvements to increase the longevity and expansion of the service whilst a strategic decision could be made. This resulted in a deliverable which so exceeded its KPI’s that the customer was able to suspend the search for a strategic platform on the basis of proof that the improved application could provide the functionality and scalability required well into the future. This represents a huge cost avoidance for the customer and the ability to further roll out the service to their corporate customer base, improving retention and quality of service.

After an initial benchmarking period Acuma agreed a set of performance, operational, scalability and functional business based deliverables with the customer. Acuma then went on to further develop areas of the application to meet those requirements, iteratively testing each enhancement to ensure it was delivering the required benefits. These activities included upgrading Data Stage and Oracle versions, improving the ETL code further, restructuring the data mart and data warehouse, instigating operational procedures and functions to ensure housekeeping was benefiting performance and ensuring data integrity, further changing report presentation architectures to meet the expectations of large customers and transaction analysis. By the conclusion of the project Acuma were able to demonstrate a system which outperformed every one of the business performance criteria from batch through to interactive reporting and ad-hoc query ensuring the quality of customer experience. Additionally Acuma were able to demonstrate the system scaling up to a number of users in excess of the customer’s existing corporate customer base for the functionality currently offered.