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Transaction Design

An A-Ha! in Time Saves Millions of Dollars

Transaction Design, Inc. (TDI) is an 11-year-old consulting company that has tremendous effect on regional and national businesses - retailers, pharmacies, financial institutions, insurers, banks, and stock exchanges, such as Bank of America, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia, Tower Records, Rite Aid, Phillips 66, and the Pacific Stock Exchange. TDI collects metrics from mission-critical systems in these multi-million-dollar businesses, processes them into a database, and then analyzes historical patterns to identify trends to watch out for. Using these analyses, they teleconference with their clients to discuss performance, best practices, and choices affected by their measurements. The thrust of their service is to offer these businesses ways to avoid system breakdown through strategic capacity management.

The metrics that TDI collects come from systems that process millions and millions of dollars a day-systems such as ATM, point-of-sale, or wire transfer. To give an idea of their scale, these systems run on large Stratus or H-P NonStop Himalaya hardware platforms that are part of huge initial investments, often $50M initially, and $5M-6M per year for upkeep. Yet, as critical as these systems are to keeping businesses going, they are treated essentially as "black boxes. That's because too often in business there isn't sufficient insight into the inner workings of these systems. And conventional 'monitoring' solutions are geared for real-time management, not strategic analysis. This lack of knowledge means that the businesses cannot truly know the impact of corporate, technical, or marketing decisions upon the throughput, response, and capacity of their computer systems.

The Price of Not Seeing Trends

What kind of impact might this lack of insight have? It can mean that a large pharmacy chain might not get through the flu season and provide the vaccine it has to have due to the demand. It can mean that a major retailer's great idea of offering gift cards in time for the Christmas season can cause their systems to crash on December 26 when people go to cash them in all at once.

Another business that has historically had large growth every year around Christmas time might think that if they are running at 20% capacity the rest of the year, that they will be fine next Christmas-but it's a disaster, and they are completely overwhelmed by demand. A major oil company on the US West Coast might not realize that continuing to batch process credit transactions at 3PM Pacific time will cause its new East Coast acquisitions to have their credit card processing completely down during rush hour-prime gasoline fill-up time-thereby losing several hundred thousand dollars a day during rush hour.

Problems TDI Faced

TDI works their magic by continuous data collection at intervals as small as 2 minutes, then pulling all this data into databases for capacity, throughput, and response time analysis. The complex reports they make are analyst-driven. The critical item in these reports are their graphs-because it is fundamentally much easier to understand and to get the necessary insight when seeing a trend plotted over time than in tabular report form.

TDI began their graphing efforts using a charting package that never worked quite right for them. Each of their clients require 30 to 40 graphs per report, and for each of these, TDI had to generate each chart manually, fiddle with the scales and legends on each one, and eventually output the series into a 14- to 20-page PDF file. Charts took 5 to 10 minutes each to generate, every time. As the teleconference with the clients is vitally important, this lack of information flow-having to nurse clients through the PDF documents-took up 40% of their conference time, as well, and distracted from the flow of their report, impeding the points they were trying to make.

Then, with many of their clients moving to large UNIX enterprise system of around 200 machines each, TDI realized that they simply could not continue with this manual process-they faced their own bottleneck! They couldn't accept such large jobs and still make money, with hundreds of charts to generate by hand. They had to find a truly automated graphing solution that would work on their Windows NT office systems.

A Strong Charting Solution

TDI's chief technologist found two likely software candidates: Crystal Reports, and Visual Mining's NetCharts Server. While Crystal Reports made adequate text reports, TDI felt they needed an exceptionally strong charting product-needed that "Aha!" for their clients that graphs inherently provide-which is why they settled on NetCharts Server as their graphing engine.

Features and Benefits

NetCharts Server integrated easily into their existing tool set. TDI takes the data into Microsoft FoxPro databases, sends formatted data off to NetCharts Server and immediately receives back a PNG image that is instantly integrated into their reports. TDI integrated NetCharts Server "without having to disassemble their whole process as Janis Kuritsubo, TDI's chief technologist said.
Visual Mining charts fit right in to the reports without any manual intervention. TDI's report chart sets come in HTML format. Their prior hyperlink-driven model broke down when key charts were buried inside a multi-page PDF document Now, TDI's charts are now completely integrated into their reports: no more detours into PDF files; no more hand-generating graphs.
NetCharts Server gives them a huge resource savings, cutting their report production time by as much as 50%.
TDI can recapture significant time normally spent navigating PDF files because they can now see graphs online during teleconferences, and reallocate it to giving their customers the insights they require-the "Aha!" they need, when they need it.
NetCharts Server works very well in heterogeneous networks and on many platforms. Now TDI can use UNIX as well as NT machines in their office network.

A Big Return on Investment

Overall, TDI has cut their production time by 50%-allowing them to spend this precious time getting and keeping new business. In their own words:

"We think with the new NetCharts Server approach, we can cut our report creation and delivery time by as much as 50%. That means we can focus more on selling, core product development, and revenue-generating professional services activities.

"So my big measure is: The Mean Time to Payback on NetCharts Server is very quick. Who wouldn't want a product where you can make your money back in 6 months or less?"

Clients who spend millions of dollars every year on their transaction systems consider TDI their insurance policy. In turn, TDI is betting on NetCharts Server to help those clients avoid potential losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars per incident. For businesses, saving one unintended downtime makes for a very rapid ROI.

Transaction Design, Inc. can be reached via their web site, at http://www.banbottlenecks.com.