Case Studies
Operational Performance Improvement
The Challenge
A large insurance company outlined several performance related challenges with its database administration group. The poor performance was adversely impacting department moral and customer service.
Symptoms of Performance:
- Roles and responsibilities lacked definition and clarity.
- Performance and related appraisals were noted as ‘Ideal’ and ‘Exceeding Expectations’ and did not offer suggestions for improvement.
- Hardware and software were not inventoried or cross referenced. This coupled with security constraints, created confusion as to where things were, how they were accessed and who had access to them.
- The support and maintenance team was understaffed for the number of servers and applications used. There was not a method to the madness, they constantly applied ‘quick fixes’ to their challenges.
The Opportunity
Raining Virtue Solutions recognized the inherent relationships between the symptoms of performance and felt several expense and service opportunities could be realized with an information systems assessment.
Our assessment shed light on potential cost savings associated with human resource utilization, operational efficiency, obsolete and underutilized hardware and software licensing.
Our goal was to realize the following:
- Reduce support costs
- Less servers to maintain
- Less applications to maintain
- Less databases to maintain
- Improve response by support teams leading to improved customer service
- Clearly define roles and responsibilities
The Solution
Our strategy focused first on producing a quick and thorough inventory and cross reference of hardware, software applications and databases serviced by the support team and used by the business community. We also partnered with the client on the following.
- From a performance standpoint, we worked with the database administration group defining, automating, and procedurualizing a set of services to support and maintain databases following best practices.
- From a personnel standpoint, we worked with management to define clear roles and responsibilities for the database administration group’s staff.
- From a maintenance standpoint, the data administration group set up a common dashboard to manage all servers, databases and applications.
- From a hardware and software perspective, a 25% hardware reduction and 30% database reduction led to an annualized cost savings of over $350,000.
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