Extreme Logic Hits Paydirt For Ceridian

The company automates payroll, benefits and other human-resources functions for companies in North America. And as any IT professional or solution provider can tell you, when it comes to payroll, the data had better be not only right, but also easily accessible.

Ceridian's huge data sets, however, were housed in 24 geographically dispersed mainframe databases. And that was a problem.

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'This is almost a server-consolidation story,' says Extreme Logic's Bruce Harple, of his company's work for its customer, Ceridian.

With 30 offices nationwide and customers ranging from the National Football League's Houston Texans to the city of Pittsburgh, Ceridian struggled to update or change payroll or benefits information in a timely manner.

Ceridian service reps often had to open a half-dozen applications to make changes for a large customer. If the mainframe was down, those updates would not take, said Bob Hughes, manager of internal application development at the Minneapolis-based company.

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Ceridian and its solution provider partner Extreme Logic determined that they needed to build a system where online updates were staged before being transmitted to the big databases.

"This is almost a server-consolidation story," said Bruce Harple, practice director at Extreme Logic. "They had 24 districts and databases and also other customer-service applications. If a big customer spanning eight of the 24 geographies needed to change payroll-processing variables, that had to be done on eight different systems . . . with all the logging on and off that requires."

The net result was that database updates lagged, and there was often a 24-hour turnaround time to get reports from the mainframes, he said.

ANATOMY OF A SOLUTION

>> COMPANY: Extreme Logic
>> FOCUS: Microsoft-centric solution provider specializing in Web-based e-business applications>> ANNUAL REVENUE: Estimated $35 million to $50 million
>> PROBLEM: Reliance on an array of mainframe databases forced delays in getting reports for human resources applications outsourcer Ceridian Products and services used: Visual Studio, SQL Server 2000, Host Integration Server, XML and XSLT, Extreme Logic's own component objects
>> LESSONS LEARNED:
• Strict and careful up-front planning of methodology eases a rollout
•A mixture of mainframe and distributed databases can be the best solution
•Pre-built reusable objects can hasten deployment

Atlanta-based Extreme Logic's goal was to set up Microsoft SQL Server 2000 databases to expedite customer change updates, reports and analytics. The payroll processing itself stayed on the mainframes, although another part of the project consolidated the mainframe databases to four from 24, Harple said.

"Those databases make sense on the mainframe. Payroll is instruction-intensive, so it made no sense to move that. What we did was build a framework for customer service [as well as a single browser-based customer-service application that talks to SQL, and then put in messaging architecture and a publish-and-subscribe setup between [the application and the mainframe," Harple said.

The resulting system allows for "pseudo realtime changes" that are stored in SQL Server and then pushed back to the mainframe asynchronously, he said.

The rollout was a joint effort,Ceridian provided the bulk of the mainframe expertise and Extreme Logic brought the Windows know-how, Hughes said.

"We knew each other's core competencies and built a team to share them with cross-training on both sides," Harple said.

A limited pilot covering a handful of districts was completed in November with the full implementation rolling out last spring. The team used Rational Software's tools and quality-assurance tools for testing, change control and change management, Harple said.

Aside from Microsoft products, Extreme Logic also used data components the company had previously built, which reduced the amount of code that had to be written.

"We used one component instead of writing SQL in multiple places," Harple said.

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