Problem

A $100M information services company’s business is providing sales and market intelligence to their subscribers.  A key part of the service is providing web access to time-sensitive documents.  The document processing facility was confident the images were being staged properly but did not have any visibility into an electronic pipeline from their servers to the data Customers could access.  No one could provide hard data on upload times, success rates, failure notifications.  Meetings were often focused around specific incidents and anecdotes.  The internal IT department insisted that Document Processing check everything in their process before changing their existing priorities to investigate the issues.  It was also made known, that the electronic pipeline had not been changed in 5+ years and the original develops were either on other high priority projects or no longer with the company.

Action

• Develop “bookend” documentation showing what goes into the pipeline and what is supposed to come out the other end.

• Detail a request for a simple daily summary log report showing what the pipeline thinks went through it

• Initiate daily reviews comparing what was known to have gone in and what went through; the output of this daily review were simple reports identifying errors so the IT department knew exactly what to investigate.

• As knowledge of the data and how to analyze it developed, a simple template was created that shortened the daily analysis time from an hour to about 5 minutes.

Results

• The requests to IT for action became very timely with full supporting data.  This drove their actions to become more open about issues with the aging system and helped resolve issues within hours of discovery. 

• Likewise, the Operations team gained visibility into their own performance that improved their understanding of how to organize their people more effectively.

• Customer complaints were reduced because issues were being fixed before Customers were impacted.

• Gaining a detailed understanding of issues related to scalability, time-sensitivity, and work traffic patterns allowed Document Processing to document their future requirements based on solid operational data.