Caché's high performance reduces Arrow Financial's processing time by as much as 80 percent
Key Benefits
- Flexibility
- High Performance
- Maintainability
What a difference a weekend can make. Brian Cutler, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Arrow Financial, arrived at work on a Monday to find his operations running six times faster than they had been on Friday. And the cause of such an impressive boost in productivity? The IT staff at the Chicago-based collection agency had spent Saturday upgrading its FACS software to a newer version based on InterSystems' Caché. Caché is a high-performance post-relational database optimized for environments with very high rates of transaction processing. FACS is a suite of systems developed for collection agencies by Ontario Systems, an InterSystems VAR in Muncie, Indiana.
Like all aspects of the financial industry, debt collection, or revenue recovery as it is more commonly called, is experiencing changes that are forcing agencies either to adjust or go out of business. Payment structures have changed too, putting more pressure on collection agencies to recoup the expense of the debt portfolios they acquire, which can cost between $500,000 to over $3 million. Arrow uses its IT systems to reduce risk by leveraging historical data stored in its database for decision support, as well as to automate its day-to-day operations.
Cutler knew that the combination of Caché's transactional multidimensional data model, which stores data in arrays instead of tables like relational systems, and Caché's Distributed Cache Protocol, which reduces network traffic, would increase his system's performance. But the day the Caché-based FACS application went live was like getting a whole new system.
"The day the Caché-based FACS application
went live
was like getting a whole new system."
That day the IT department processed 10,000 letters in an hour and a half; before the job would have taken six. Procesing 94,000 accounts now took only six and a half hours, shaving 30 hours off the job. Batch processing and reporting on more than a million accounts-normally a 24 hour job-now was accomplished in just three hours. That afternoon's number of processes topped off at 153 processes. Before, 100 processes would have caused performance problems.
Cutler also saw greater productivity from Arrow's account representatives. Cutler's new Caché-based application allows Arrow's representatives to work easier with debtors by giving them information faster. "Screens are painting quicker, which is one reason why they're making more calls," Cutler explained. Requests and updates to the database that used to take up to five seconds have been reduced over 50 percent. With each of Arrow's 120 telephone representatives calling an average of 200 accounts a day, these few extra seconds add up to a total of 20 more hours that representatives have access to data.
Arrow utilizes an HP K260 9000 Series multiprocessor system. Before upgrading, Cutler was considering more hardware that would have cost $30,000 to increase his application's performance. "The one thing Caché lets us do is maximize our hardware. Before the upgrade, 120 processes would have brought our system to its knees," said Cutler. "Now we're doing 165 to 175 processes at a time and we actually have idle CPU to use. This is using the very same hardware."
Arrow Financial has been a customer of InterSystems VAR Ontario Systems for 11 years. "They truly are our partners," said Cutler. "I know you hear from vendors all of the time that they want to be your partners-until something happens, then you wonder where they went. Ontario Systems doesn't act like that."
Arrow Financial is experiencing more than 50 percent growth. Using the performance enhancing characteristics of post-relational Caché, Arrow is better able to take advantage of its data to grow the business. "That's how we got to where we are today," said Cutler.
"The technology is out there for anyone who wants to use it," Cutler continued. "But the hard part is knowing how to use it. Caché lets us harness the power within our system to reduce risk. Its high performance allows us to run the business efficiently and therefore more profitably."