ATALIAN Global Services

Atalian Global Services provides Janitorial/Custodial, Security, Mechanical, Engineering and Special Services (including Metal, Stone, and Wood restoration and maintenance) and other soft and hard facility services to clients in the US spanning a variety of industries.

Background
Atalian Global Services has been running JD Edwards since early 2000 and is currently on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2.

The company is using eight Purge-it! Modules: Accounts Payable; Accounts Receivable; Custom Module; Custom Module Extension Pack; General Ledger; HR Payroll; Purchasing; and Works Orders.

Key challenges

A build-up of end-of-life data

Data had accumulated in the company’s JD Edwards system in large volumes since early 2000. The company was aware that much of the data was end-of-life data and therefore no longer required by the business. Little to no data purging had happened before working with Klik IT.

Slowing system

Severe performance issues were being experienced when trying to run routine reports. Thousands of business users access the system. Each user typically has more than 2700 accounts. Trying to run a trial balance was taking many hours.

Table misconfiguration

Some of the JD Edwards tables had been incorrectly configured. Continued misuse of tables leads to millions of unneeded records being generated. For example, despite Atalian not being a Manufacturing Company, Manufacturing tables were used for Works Orders.

This created some circa 27 million records that weren’t used or required.

Setting up a Data Retention Policy

Atalian aligned the company’s Data Retention Policy with the US requirement of keeping financial data for a total of seven years.

The most recent three years of Production data will be retained on the production database before being moved to the archive database for four years, meeting the US requirement to retain data for seven years. Thereafter, archived data older than four years is purged from the archive database.

Purges will be run monthly in Production.

Tackling the data challenge

Once the Data Retention Policy was established, the next step was to bring the archive and purge activity up to date. This took place over two phases. Results of each phase are below:

Over the two phases of purging and archiving, the Production database (represented by the dark blue area in the table above), has seen a sizeable reduction of almost two-thirds.

Going forwards, as Atalian adheres to its Data Retention Policy of keeping data for a maximum of 7 years (across both archive and purge databases) and purges are run monthly in Production, a further decrease in the archive database size will occur (represented by the light blue area in the table).

Key Benefits

• A Data Retention Policy has been agreed on by the business
• Redundant data has been archived and purged
• Future archive and purge activity is planned in line with the Data Retention Policy
• System performance and responsiveness has improved noticeably, particularly with regards to accounting processes
• The archive and purge project is outsourced, as a service, to Klik IT
• Atalian receive regular data analysis reports from Klik IT
• Archive and purge activity and analysis are also visible via Purge-it! EnterpriseOne Management Dashboards

Ahmed Orabi, Executive Vice President of Technology Services, Atalian Global Services explains:

“I’m glad we made the decision to invest in Archiving as a Service with Klik IT. I don’t have to add yet another process to my monthly tasks internally. Klik IT has the expertise and knowledge of their Purge-it! software and will handle the JD Edwards archiving and purging on an ongoing basis on behalf of our company.”