With Attunity and Cognos, JM Family is in the driver’s seat for reporting and analysis
JM Family Enterprises, Inc. is the 17th- largest privately-held company in the U. S. It is also currently ranked No. 9 on the InformationWeek 500 list of leading technology innovators, its fifth consecutive year on the list. Founded in 1968, JM Family has grown from a core distribution business into a diversified automotive corporation with a focus on vehicle distribution and processing, finance and warranty services, insurance activities, retail sales, and dealer-focused technology products and services. Today the company is a $9.4 billion force in the industry with more than 4,400 associates nationwide.
When it needed fast, comprehensive access to data and better reporting and analysis, JM Family drove straight to Cognos and Attunity.
CHALLENGES FACED - TIME IS MONEY
As with many companies, JM Family was encountering increased costs associated with accessing data from multiple sources. At the time, the company was using Impromptu in an infrastructure comprised of various data marts on Windows/2000 and Sun Solaris, Informatica, Mainframe with operational data, VSAM, and DB2/MVS.
Data replication was done on a daily basis to replicate key operational data from DB2/MVS and moved to various other systems on different platforms (Windows and UNIX). In this case, data replication was being done to move the recent changes from DB2/MVS to various other distributed systems for operational analysis. The process took 40 hours each month. In addition to the amount of time it was taking, JM Family was also concerned about the costs associated with support personnel and moving data, in addition to performing timely updates of key operational data.
The company was also experiencing inefficient access across databases for reporting and analysis. At the time, it was using the following methods:
· For connectivity, JM Family was using DBMS specific connectivity tools and creating DBMS-specific joined views for multi-table access for reporting through Cognos 7 Impromptu.
· For CICS transactions, it was using a screen-scraping tool to provide its information to distributed applications.
· For DB2 CDC, it used a combination of home grown applications and Data Mirror.
As the parent company of Southeast Toyota Distributors, LLC, the world’s largest private distributor of Toyota and Scion vehicles, JM Family also found that its analysis and business decision-making process was limited because of the lack of operational data available to populate various operational and analytical databases on Oracle and SQL Server.
STRATEGY FOLLOWED - ATTUNITY CONNECT AND ATTUNITY STREAM
JM Family implemented the Attunity Integration Suite. With Attunity it benefitted from:
· Achieve near real-time data synchronization and migration with Attunity Connect
· Implement CDC with Attunity Stream
In doing so they would be able to provide:
· Mainframe Integration - By unlocking business data and reducing the complexity and cost with a service-oriented approach to building composite applications and portals
· Legacy data access for BI - By providing access to mainframe and legacy data the company could bring all data to the decision-making process
· Real-time ETL - Dramatically improving ETL efficiency and reducing latency in the data warehouse with change data capture
On the front end, Cognos 7 Impromptu works with the Attunity Integration Suite to seamlessly bring together information from legacy data sources and display it as completely unified answers to essential business questions.
BENEFITS REALIZED – BUSINESS and TECHNICAL
JM Family uses Attunity Connect to integrate data contained in mainframe data sources, DB2, and VSAM, and distributed data sources such as IBM’s DB2/UDB. The product has enabled connectivity between all components of the company’s architecture with two-way updates made possible between all key data stores. This has allowed JM Family to proactively manage its business in real time giving it increased flexibility and efficiency that has resulted in significant cost benefits equivalent to thousands of dollars.
With Attunity’s Stream solution for CDC, JM Family moves only changes in DB2/MVS to multiple targets consisting of Oracle and SQL Server RDBMS and DB2/UDB. This allows the company to significantly cut mainframe processing time and eliminate the use of replication on the mainframe. The customized monthly data replication the company had been doing has now been replaced with Attunity Stream and Informatica PowerCenter, allowing it to capture key updates in operational data in real-time (sub-second response) while significantly reducing effort and costs.
Establishing a Service Oriented Architecture
JM Family now uses Cognos 7 and benefits from a complete view of critical operational data no matter where it resides in its architecture. By presenting this complete view of data that was previously unavailable and making it part of the data warehouse, the Attunity solution provides Cognos 7 with the necessary data for better decision-making.
Additionally, because JM Family has standardized on a single product for CDC using Attunity Stream, it no longer has to build individual custom solutions for capturing changes made to various operational databases. This standardization and the ability to access the data it needs from multiple sources in real time has allowed the company to realize significant development and maintenance savings.
“Attunity is now one of the core components of our new established service oriented architecture at JM Family, providing an architecture with increased flexibility and integrated components for bi-directional updates,” says Ravindran. “In addition to the time and money we are saving by not having to develop and maintain custom solutions, we have also cut costs by leveraging some of our legacy applications with new and enhanced distributed applications.”