InsightETE "Providing Insight into complex systems by
measuring business performance End-To-End."

InsightETE Success Story - ODJFS

About the Client

The State of Ohio, Division of Job & Family Services (ODJFS) handles all employment and economic assistance, child support, and family services for the State of Ohio.

The Business Problem

Problems with a key application were resulting in 6-10 second average delays for every transaction with the worst taking up to 10 minutes to complete. Each IT group (network, database, application, server) performed separate analyses and found nothing wrong.

ODJFS asked InsightETE to analyze the application with Insight:Analyzer to:

  • Measure the actual response time of the WOTC application
  • Pinpoint the problems and determine corrections to be made
  • Improve response time

InsightETE’s Solution

Insight:Analyzer was used to pinpoint the problems with Insight:SLM baselining the response times. The system was installed and collecting data in 4 hours. Within a week, the data was analyzed and the results presented to ODJFS management.

Two problems were found. Several inquiry transactions that were repeatedly hanging, and other transaction types were configured with incorrect database lookups. Once the specific problems were identified, the IT staff quickly corrected both problems.

The InsightETE ROI

The results were stunning. The average response times decreased to 2 seconds, while end-user productivity improved by 59%. Employees who were processing 2200 transactions per day now were completing 3500 transactions per day. This amounts to a total productivity savings of about $400,000 per year.

The Client’s Reaction

ODJFS was so impressed with the results, that they permanently installed Insight:SLM to monitor and track their four most important applications used by the department.

Technical Addendum

WOTC was a two-tier Delphi application using DB2 Connect and a mainframe-based IMS database on the backend. The end-users were located in one geographic location with the main data center located in another geographic location. The architecture was reasonably straightforward with a number of hops, firewalls, servers, and routers included on the round trip path.