Leading Organizations Rely on PLATINUM DecisionBase to Maximize Investments in ERP Data
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PLATINUM technology has announced that leading organizations are leveraging PLATINUM DecisionBase for data transformation and movement to speed deployment of ERP systems, such as PeopleSoft and SAP, and maximize the value of data contained in the systems. University of South Florida (USF) and BASF rely on PLATINUM DecisionBase for its powerful combination of data transformation and movement technology and the industry's leading enterprise repository to integrate and leverage critical data from multiple, disparate sources for better business decisions and increased competitive advantage.

"With DecisionBase, our customers can quickly and easily move and combine data from ERPs and other data sources to improve enterprisewide decision support and optimize return on investment in systems from multiple vendors," said Jeff Schultz, PLATINUM's vice president of marketing for knowledge management. "DecisionBase helps users reduce the time, risks, and costs associated with building and populating warehouses and ERP systems to more quickly derive value from business data."

University of South Florida

With an enrollment of 40,000 students, Tampa-based USF is the 13th largest university in the U.S. USF leverages DecisionBase to migrate 80 percent of its legacy business systems to human resource and payroll packaged applications from PeopleSoft and to student, alumni, and financial aid packaged applications from SCT, a higher-education software company. As a longtime PLATINUM Repository user, USF is familiar with PLATINUM tools and services and chose DecisionBase as a logical progression of the relationship for support of this massive conversion.

"PLATINUM DecisionBase has helped us to achieve dramatic performance and productivity improvements," said Jan Pipkin, data manager for USF. "The solution has been instrumental in USF's ability to manage data and maintain its integrity for consistent and accurate data management and reporting. With PLATINUM, USF can quickly and effectively accomplish a critical conversion to our new ERP systems while continuing to leverage existing data. PLATINUM demonstrates ongoing attention to our evolving requirements and is committed to our success."

USF utilizes DecisionBase to accelerate transition to the new systems which will enable improved access to and consistency of data for enterprise querying, analyzing, and reporting. DecisionBase is used to successfully transfer data from mainframe applications to SCT and PeopleSoft applications, and from operational to warehouse databases.

The university considers DecisonBase's automatic script generation to be one of its greatest benefits. USF's IT team members leverage the predefined language scripts to map and generate transformations without having to invest in the task of learning PeopleSoft's proprietary coding language. Additionally, the team can schedule the scripts to run at any time, or to run contingent upon completion of another event, ensuring system and human resources are effectively allocated and that end users have access to clean data when and how they need it. DecisionBase's broad capabilities - with more than 170 different functions - has also proven to be a tremendous strength.

BASF

In order to maximize its investment in a regional SAP/R3 platform, BASF in Asia Pacific, part of a global chemical group, needed to build a regionwide information management infrastructure. BASF selected PLATINUM DecisionBase and PLATINUM InfoBeacon, a decision support tool that provides advanced online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities for data warehouse environments, to support this immense undertaking. The combination of tools will help BASF reach its goals to consolidate sales and profitability data across approximately 45 BASF companies in Asia Pacific, which are currently using SAP/R3 data for daily transactional performance. In addition, BASF required a scalable data analysis infrastructure to support future integration of SAP data with other critical corporate information for maximum ease of use and improved decision-making.

This data warehouse infrastructure will enable BASF users to access and analyze critical SAP information on their desktops whenever they need it. The availability of such information on a timely basis will promote better and faster decision-making for the organization.

"PLATINUM's data warehousing solutions will allow us to decrease reporting time and provide business information to management and users throughout the BASF organization in the region," said Andy Postlethwaite, regional manager for sales, material management systems, for BASF in Asia Pacific. "We were looking for a data extraction tool that would support SAP and a front-end technology with strong analysis capabilities. We chose to work with PLATINUM because of the scope of technology and solutions it offers, as well as the PLATINUM consultants who took the time and effort to understand our business requirements."

About DecisionBase

DecisionBase helps IT users quickly build and deploy data marts and warehouses with the industry's first combination of powerful data transformation and movement technology with an industry-leading enterprise repository to streamline warehouse initiatives. The easy-to-use graphical interface makes it possible for users to employ simple point-and-click commands to describe how data is transformed and moved among disparate databases. DecisionBase's programming language enables users to easily customize data movement and transformation applications for complex jobs. The solution's metadata management technology, based on the industry-leading PLATINUM Repository, increases the productivity of data mart and warehouse managers by rendering reuse of transformations scripts.

About PLATINUM technology International, inc.

PLATINUM technology International, inc., headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, had 1998 revenues of $968 million. PLATINUM provides software and services that help IT organizations manage and improve the IT infrastructure. For information, visit http://www.platinum.com.