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Comerica Bank Uses Strobe to Solve Performance Puzzle
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Comerica Incorporated, a financial services company headquartered in Dallas, offers three strategically aligned business segments for its customers: business banking, retail banking and wealth and institutional management. It is imperative that the online documentation system that backs up account and document withdrawals, deposits and other account activity works efficiently for a multistate network of more than 500 branch, lending and investment offices. At the heart of the company’s documentation process is the vendor-supplied Comerica Online Documents (COLD) application that archives, restores and retrieves these types of reports electronically. When this application was originally installed, the company started backing up a month’s worth of statements on a mainframe disk drive. Any request for account statements from over a month, however, was backed up on tape. To improve application response time, Comerica moved a year’s worth of account statements from tape to the mainframe disk drive. The company expected to see better response time, but that wasn’t the case. The system took the same amount of time to retrieve the account statements as it did before its IT team implemented the change.
About The Customer
Comerica Incorporated is a financial services company headquartered in Dallas. It offers three strategically aligned business segments for its customers: business banking, retail banking and wealth and institutional management. The company operates a multistate network of more than 500 branch, lending and investment offices. At the heart of the company’s operations is the Comerica Online Documents (COLD) application, a vendor-supplied system that archives, restores and retrieves account statements and other documents electronically. The company had been backing up a month’s worth of statements on a mainframe disk drive, with older statements backed up on tape. To improve application response time, Comerica moved a year’s worth of account statements from tape to the mainframe disk drive.
The Solution
Reimann’s team attended an on-site Compuware class demonstrating how Compuware Strobe measured online activity in CICS environments. Although Comerica was already using Strobe to measure batch activity, it had not been used widely for online environments. Strobe’s ability to drill through multiple layers of a CICS application to measure actual online activity proved to be a valuable capability for Reimann’s team. Using the Strobe profile report, the team drilled down through the SQL to find which program statement consumed too much CPU. In this case, the culprit was in the database. A closer look at the table structure revealed a Report Date, Report Name sequence, the exact opposite of the actual call. In using Strobe, the IT team at Comerica was able to conserve CPU usage. “Strobe showed us that one SQL statement was eating up a good 60 percent of CPU usage,” said Reimann. “After we fixed the problem, we noticed more than a 25 percent reduction in CPU usage.”
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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