The Importance of Crossjoin’s independent view

“The Importance of Crossjoin’s independent view“

It should be said that Crossjoin gains many new clients on firefighting opportunities, when quick, assertive, and strong capabilities and knowledge are required to first pinpoint what the root cause of the issue is and what can be done to surpass that issue.

It was on one of these opportunities that we understood even better than when we, Crossjoin, are in an advantageous position inside the structure of our client, the possibilities of gaining more scope and their trust in our work are greatly increased!

The client was worried because as there were changes of requirements, 2 months later the overall process of the End-of-Month (EOM from now on) would have to take a maximum of 3 business days, and it was usually taking a bit more. As this is a complex flow that includes multiple EOM processes of many different applications, we were requested to help in improving whatever there was to improve.

One of the main discoveries was that Application A (App A) was getting refreshed data from application B (App B) and this process was taking over 10 hours. These are separate applications, with different application servers and databases. This process was to refresh the materialized views in App A, with data from views from App B. One important detail is that App B has 2 DBs. One is the applicational DB and the other serves as the interface DB, where App A connects to. App A selects data from App B interface DB views, that for instance selects data from tables from App B application DB.

With the required accesses we were able to recommend changes that would give an improvement of over 80%, from over 10 to less than 2 hours, in the space of a couple of days. These were fairly simple changes that distributed the right work between the right databases.

From the client, we received a graceful “Thank you!” and also an inquisitive “How come no one saw this before?”.

So…how come? Of course, we didn’t tell you everything.

There were 2 different operations teams responsible for App A and App B. The team from App A was reporting slowness in refreshing data from App B, and App B was reporting that the slowness was in a process from App A. We discussed with both teams, helped them to create a bridge of communication between them and together we were able to reach the proposed recommendations.

This is a case where Crossjoin, having a more external view on the whole process, was able to be a PLUS in the organization of the client by identifying the root cause of the issues and proposing the best solutions.