Scenarios for data transformation

These scenarios show how organizations used InfoSphere® DataStage® to address their complex data transformation and movement needs.

Retail: Consolidating financial systems

A leading retail chain watched sales flatten for the first time in years. Without insight into store-level and unit-level sales data, they could not adjust shipments or merchandising to improve results. With long lead times for production and existing, large-volume manufacturing contracts, they could not change their product lines quickly, even if they understood the problem. To integrate the company's forecasting, distribution, replenishment, and inventory management processes, they needed a way to migrate financial reporting data from many systems to a single system of record.

The company deployed InfoSphere Information Server to deliver data integration services between business applications in both messaging and batch file environments. InfoSphere DataStage is now the company-wide standard for transforming and moving data. The service-oriented interface allows them to define common integration tasks and reuse them throughout the enterprise. This new methodology and the use of reusable components for other global projects will lead to future savings in design, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

Banking: Understanding the customer

A large retail bank understood that the more it knew about its customers, the better it could market its products, including credit cards, savings accounts, checking accounts, certificates of deposit, and ATM services. Faced with terabytes of customer data from vendor sources, the bank recognized the need to integrate the data into a central repository where decision-makers could retrieve it for market analysis and reporting. Without a solution, the bank risked flawed marketing decisions and lost cross-selling opportunities.

The bank used InfoSphere DataStage to automatically extract, transform, and load raw vendor data into its data warehouse, such as credit card account information, banking transaction details, and web site usage statistics. From a unified data warehouse, the bank can generate reports to track the effectiveness of programs and analyze marketing efforts. InfoSphere DataStage helps the bank maintain, manage, and improve its information management with an IT staff of three instead of six or seven, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year alone, and enabling it to use the same capabilities more rapidly on other data integration projects.