America First Credit Union
Investing in Optimized ECM
America First Credit Union (AFCU) is a federally chartered credit union with more than 110 branch locations, 700,000 members and $7 billion in assets.
A Need to Better Record and Understand Performance
We have partnered with AFCU for more than 12 years, implementing and maintaining its IBM enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.
AFCU’s ECM platform supports document submission, retrieval, indexing, and quality control, as well as signature capture and verification, and loan and membership processing. The system supports more than 2,400 users and approximately eight million document requests a year and plays an integral role in operations and member services.
AFCU wanted to improve its ability to record and understand the performance and usage of its ECM platform. Given the robust nature of the system, the records department had difficulty monitoring usage statistics and investigating the causes of performance issues. AFCU has a service level agreement that document retrievals must take less than one second per page on average. Though typically below this threshold, an environment migration led to some slowdowns and AFCU wanted to uncover the cause before the issues impacted end users.
Distilling Optimized Enterprise Content Management
To address AFCU’s ECM platform concerns we installed and implemented two proprietary optimization products: Report Data eXchange, a utility that processes data generated by the IBM ECM event log and builds detailed data tables, and Distillr, a data visualization tool that monitors statistics from user-configured data sources.
Distillr is an ECM platform management, optimization, and reporting solution based on open source Big Data technology and our bestin-class ECM expertise. Data is displayed via dashboards including graphs, charts, and other customizable reports. Distillr is designed to ensure confidence in ECM platforms, which is essential when supporting content-enabled applications and processes with strict SLAs. With out-of-the-box components, pre-configured dashboards, and sample metrics that encapsulate decades of ECM platform management expertise, Distillr requires a minimal services engagement compared to other tools.
During the implementation, Distillr’s out-of-the-box reports were leveraged extensively. In addition to these pre-built reports, five additional custom reports were created.
Platform performance monitoring that was previously run monthly is now done in real-time. This allows AFCU IT to tweak the environment and immediately see any performance impacts or benefits that may have occurred.
Results
A Sound Investment for the Business
AFCU can now monitor usage statistics, capture trends in system performance, and quickly find and address performance issues in near-real time
- Platform performance monitoring that was previously run monthly is now done in real-time. This allows AFCU IT to tweak the environment and immediately see any performance impacts or benefits that may have occurred.
- Distillr allows AFCU to monitor storage area contents to ensure that all documents are deleted in accordance to retention policies.
- AFCU can proactively reach out to assist users encountering slow performance, even if the user is not reporting issues
Distillr is a great enhancement to our content management system. The solution allows us to quickly and comprehensively analyze massive data sets generated by the system, proactively identify potential issues, and quickly uncover information about a situation.Imaging Systems Administrator, ACFU
