Archives: Success Stories

Ultra Mobile

Ultra Mobile international mobile plans and services for keeping people connected with families and friends overseas (PRNewsFoto/Ultra Mobile)

Ultra Mobile is a prepaid mobile carrier with a mission to democratize wireless by making international calling more affordable and accessible. It serves millions of people in the United States with extended families, friends and colleagues living around the world.

CHALLENGE
Ultra Mobile seeks to continuously deliver new products and services to maintain and grow its customer base, but the proliferation of massive amounts of data was beginning to negatively affect business intelligence. The company needed to provide information to executive leadership as quickly as possible, as well as de-mitigate risk for unmanaged changes, like data gaps between different departments, and manage change, like difficulty integrating data documentation for each project.

SOLUTION
erwin DI provides a company-wide data governance framework that gives business users the power of self-service data discovery. With it, the Ultra Mobile BI team can catalog data assets, add definitions within a business glossary, and maintain a searchable repository for understanding how data is used and stored.

RESULTS 

  • Quality-of-service issues are proactively detected and corrected, averting mass customer churn.
  • Ultra Mobile can quickly identify process inefficiencies and make changes that drive profitability.
  • Terabytes of raw data now can be viewed with business context, ensuring business users understand it for maximum use and promoting consistency in reporting activities across departments.
  • The Ultra Mobile BI team can trace and audit data maps from a single source, including version and change management, to demonstrate value to the business.

Zovio

Zovio is an education technology services company that partners with higher education institutions and employers to deliver innovative, personalized solutions to help learners and leaders achieve their aspirations.

CHALLENGE
Zovio’s long-term data governance strategy involves metadata management, data mapping/lineage, data quality management, and reference data management for regulatory compliance in addition to business transformation. Following input from stakeholders across the company, Zovio established its data governance program and long-term roadmap. The team then began evaluating technology options by forming a selection panel, reviewing analyst research, requesting proposals, selecting vendors, and conducting a proof of concept.


SOLUTION
The erwin Data Intelligence Suite (erwin DI) was chosen as Zovio’s data governance platform because of its sophistication, robust functionality, and ease of use. Among other key factors are its automation capabilities, particularly integration with Tableau for BI reporting and various other third-party tools.


RESULTS

  • Governance of key data elements within the company’s most critical reports
  • Common terms and standardized definitions to ensure executive leadership and other key stakeholders understand reporting
  • Auto generation and documentation of data mappings and data lineage for Tableau BI and six other mission-critical tools (SSRS, SSAS, PBI, SSIS, SQL and MS Azure Data Factory)
  • Ability to support technology and data teams with data mappings and end-to-end lineage
  • Sensitive data discovery and tagging (e.g., student addresses and social security numbers) for GDPR and CCPA compliance
  • Easy and efficient self-service data discovery for data governance staff

E.ON

E.ON is an international, privately owned energy supplier based in Essen, Germany, with approximately 73,000 employees. With a clear focus on three strong core businesses — Energy Networks, Customer Solutions and Renewables — the company aims to become the partner of choice for energy and customer solutions.

CHALLENGE

As part of its digital transformation and innovation efforts, E.ON was determined to achieve better governance over its rapidly expanding sources of data — and leverage them for maximum impact.

SOLUTION

The company realized that taking better advantage of data and data intelligence would help improve customer services, increase efficiency in energy production, and make it easier to meet the regulatory requirements of the countries where E.ON operates. erwin Data Intelligence (erwin DI) was deployed for automated metadata management, data harvesting, data lineage documentation and impact analysis.

RESULTS

  • Identification of more than 8 million Euros in business impact after 18 months
  • Rapidly scaling metadata management capabilities, with 44 data domains defined, 175 users trained, and 550 business terms created
  • Ensuring a common, compliant way of working across all RUs and BUs, based on standards, roles, policies and understanding
  • Estimated potential savings of 30 percent on external data management costs and a 50 percent reduction in time spent on data discovery
  • Delivering “data governance as a service” for one-stop data access and lineage

QAD

Adecco

Finance & Insurance Global

A global finance and insurance corporation with operations in more than 80 countries and jurisdictions that provides a range of products, including general property/casualty, life insurance and retirement and financial services.

CHALLENGE

The customer’s life and retirement business unit is migrating 10 data sources to a cloud-based data lake to serve as its central data hub.

SOLUTION

The customer decided to implement the erwin Data Intelligence (DI) Suite to harvest the metadata from its various systems, including core, legacy and on-premise Hadoop systems, and ingest it into the new AWS-hosted data lake based on source-to-target mappings.

RESULTS

  • Multi-fold productivity increase (> 85 %) over traditional means, as manually intensive and complex coding efforts have been automated
  • Steep improvement in productivity (> 70 %) because of seamless access to and visibility of all metadata, including end-to-end lineage
  • Complete traceability and auditability of data maps from a single source, including version and change management

Pharmaceutical Europe

This customer is a multinational healthcare company headquartered in Europe, committed to improving lives through pharmaceuticals and diagnostics

CHALLENGE

To accelerate development, as well as aggregate data from different systems for internal customers to access and share. Additionally, the company needed lineage and traceability for regulatory compliance efforts. With this ability, they can identify data sources, transformations and usage to safeguard protected health information (PHI) for clinical trials.

SOLUTION

The customer chose to work with erwin and selected both erwin Data Catalog and erwin Data Vault.

RESULTS

  • Saved an estimated 70% of the costs of manual development
  • Generated 95% of the production code with “zero touch,” improving the time to business value and significantly reduced costly re-work associated with error-prone manual processes

Telecom USA

The customer is a multi-billion-dollar global telecom company headquartered in New Jersey that provides residential and business communication solutions.

CHALLENGE

The customer wanted to move toward a Big Data architecture and be able to integrate metadata from such internal systems as Kafka, Flume, Hadoop, RDBMS, Teradata, flat files and MongoDB.

SOLUTION

erwin executed a proof-of-concept (POC) to demonstrate the feasibility of automating the conversion of legacy graphs to Talend using erwin’s data connectors and partnered with Talend to architect and validate the solution design.

RESULTS

  • Realized efficient and on-time conversion of 30+ legacy graphs compromised of approximately 1,000 components
  • Integrated data from internal systems, including Kafka, Flume, Hadoop, RDBMS, Teradata, flat files and MongoDB
  • Streamlined the ETL conversion process, making it predictable, consistent and easy to adopt best practices and design
  • Provided robust technology, a futuristic roadmap, and the ability to scale according to the changing technical landscape and market advances

Daktronics

Daktronics, based in Brookings, South Dakota, designs, manufactures, sells and services video displays, scoreboards, digital billboards, dynamic message signs, sound systems and related products. The company is known for its electronic LED displays.

CHALLENGE

As Daktronics was building out its EA practice, the team needed a better way to capture the current state of its business, applications, infrastructure and data architecture. After determining that ArchiMate was the best way to describe, analyze and visualize its architecture within and across business domains in an unambiguous way, it needed to find an EA tool.

SOLUTION

After evaluating several EA solutions, erwin Evolve was selected because it is compatible with ArchiMate, cloud-hosted for fast implementation with lower cost and has a configurable metamodel for easy modifications. In addition, erwin Evolve enables the retrieval of information from other systems for reporting via APIs. With erwin EA, you can also easily create and retrieve diagrams, including the associated relationships for future use.

RESULTS

  • Fast and easy to implement
  • Configurable with ability to create information beyond ArchiMate
  • Ability to conduct impact analyses based on roles and processes via APIs
  • Cost-effective

Pharmaceutical USA

The customer is a global pharmaceutical giant headquartered in the United States. It produces medicines and vaccines for a wide range of medical disciplines, including immunology, oncology, cardiology, diabetology, endocrinology, and neurology

CHALLENGE

The customer had been managing all its data mappings in Excel spreadsheets, a 100-percent manual process so assessing the change impact and determining end to end lineage was a significant challenge.

Like many other large companies, this customer wanted to replace manual data mapping with an automated software solution to drive down costs and timeframes.

SOLUTION

By implementing erwin Mapping Manager, the customer was able to scan in all source and target system metadata and maintain it within a single repository. Then new mappings easily were created using drag-and-drop techniques, accelerating the mapping integration process.

RESULTS

  • Automated legacy mapping processes for extraordinary time savings and total cost reduction of 60%
  • Built error-free data mappings with drag-and-drop feature
  • Implemented and enforced industry best practices and standards