National City Corporation Banks on Daman Incorporated for New Data Warehouse/Data Mart Solutions

Process Flow Streamlined for More Efficient Data Access

National City Corporation is a $51 billion diversified financial services company. With over 150 years of banking experience, NCC is recognized as a leader in providing excellent service for consumers and businesses of every type.

To help continue this tradition of excellence, NCC realized that they would have to continue to improve data access and decision support for their end users. Therefore, they began work on an enterprisewide data warehouse (EDW) and a functional data warehouse on their Tandem K20000 platform. They also made plans to build a Transactional Data Store (TDS) to support analysis of transactional data and to allow appropriate aggregations of data feeds into the EDW.

Finally, an infrastructure was planned for the enterprisewide roll out of ETI*EXTRACT, a tool suite used to automate and accelerate the development process.

Complex Migrations and An Enhanced TDS
Working closely with NCC personnel, Daman consultants developed the data movement model and migration solution, using ETI*EXTRACT. The project was highly complex and required the migration of information from six different legacy systems. Three types of conversions were involved: query of source (UFAM), changed data capture/transformations, and the population of the data warehouse and data mart.

Daman Incorporated completed all migrations on schedule and on budget. Daman also provided the design and implementation for the TDS. This project included the development of all data interfaces from two source applications to the TDS, as well as the development of infrastructure enhancements to facilitate the load process into the TDS.

Infrastructure enhancements involved using ETI*EXTRACT to provide a DataLoader/MP Data System Library. This library offers a reusable, low maintenance, and cost-effective means for loading data on the Tandem system.

Improved Process Flow
To improve the process flow of data loading from operational applications to the data warehouse and data mart, Daman incorporated several significant changes. They developed code to streamline the load process itself. They also made several changes to the process to help take greater advantage of the Tandem K20000 platform.

In addition, they redesigned job flows so that jobs which had been previously running sequentially could now run in parallel. They also redefined data tables and implemented other changes in the database structures.

As a result of these changes, overall load performance was improved and end-users could access more data in a timely, effective manner.

Toward Complete Client Self-Sufficiency
Daman Incorporated worked to make NCC to become self-sufficient with their decision support solution. Efforts included the enhancement of applications so errors could be handled more effectively. It also included the enhancement and development of extensive documentation.

Equally important, an aggressive program of mentoring and knowledge transfer was undertaken. The program focused on a comprehensive, practical knowledge of the decision support solutions. It also included special emphasis on the optimal use of ETI*EXTRACT. Detailed instruction was provided by Daman's ETI*EXTRACT Master Users who have been certified by Evolutionary Technologies International, Inc., the developer of the tool suite.

A Strong Infrastructure for Ongoing Benefits
Backed by the design, development and support efforts of Daman Incorporated, NCC has improved its ongoing ability to rapidly implement new strategic decision support applications ... efficiently migrate to new platforms ... continue to expand the information available to end-users ... and help end-users take better advantage of business information for improved, effective decision making.