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Client:
State Government Health Agency
Industry:
Government
Solution:
Improve system performance of Great Plains and Warehouse Management System by performance tuning Microsoft SQL Server and implementing SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Benefits:
Improved customer service to agency customers; Ability to compete with private sector health care providers; Reduced system maintenance costs.
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The Client:
Halcyon’s client is a government agency that works to assure access to quality mental health services for citizens at all levels of need and life stages. It is estimated that nearly two million citizens will need mental health services during their lives for problems ranging from situational stress to severe and chronic mental illness. Last year, the State’s public mental health system provided care to more than 300,000 people, including 100,000 children.
The Situation:
The agency has implemented Great Plains for order entry and inventory management functions. The Great Plains system interfaces with a Warehouse Management System through the use of Scribe. The integration between the two packages has consistently created problems for the agency in the form of poor system performance and downtime. As a result, the agency’s customers were unable to enter food orders and had to resort to submitting them on paper.
The Challenge:
The agency’s Great Plains and Warehouse Management system performance had been on a downward trend since last fall and was making it practically impossible to perform day-to-day operations such as order processing, collaboration between the teams that process orders in various stages, management reporting, and monitoring of the system. In spite of being a government entity, the agency had competition that was ready to take over the business from them and provide better service. All this was caused by unacceptably slow performance of their systems.
The Solution:
In a short timeframe, Halcyon analyzed the system and various processes that were not running at an acceptable performance level and provided a detailed report with possible solutions to the problem. Halcyon recommended utilizing the ETL component of Microsoft’s own database platform, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in place of Scribe. The team also removed random database objects from the production system that were causing unnecessary overhead, performance and security vulnerability. Performance was significantly improved by using these methods. The Halcyon team also created maintenance plans to create / update indexes and statistics and replaced existing scheduled ETL processes with SSIS packages that include appropriate tasks available in Microsoft Business Intelligence Suite.
The Results:
Halcyon was able to implement the identified performance improvement plan and the system performance improved to acceptable levels. The agency’s customers were now able to use the system to complete their functions on time. The agency was also able to secure additional funding to replace the entire integration layer with Microsoft’s SSIS tool. This has resulted in improved customer service and reduced maintenance costs due to an upgraded system architecture. |
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