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MSA leverages Control-M to turn big data into big insights for clients

18 hours

saved on weekly deliverables

15% of staff

reassigned to value-added tasks

200k files

transferred weekly

Overview

Management Science Associates (MSA) is a data management pioneer that has been providing services to consumer goods manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and other companies since 1963. Information Management Systems (IMS) is the company’s largest division, managing data for more than $1 billion in trade promotion funds for clients in the consumer packaged goods industry.

The Challenge

MSA helps customers extract insights from their data to secure the best product positions in retail stores. The company needed a more efficient infrastructure that would support its planned transition to the Hadoop big data environment. Its legacy workload management system was impeding the company’s ability to scale out. To keep up, operations staff regularly worked weekends and overtime to meet daily and weekly deliverable commitments to customers.

The volumes, failure rates, and reliance on scripting in day-to-day operations were unsustainable if MSA wanted to take advantage of Hadoop to introduce new innovations and services.

The Choice

MSA decided to significantly upgrade its workload automation and file transfer capabilities to support its development of new services on Hadoop. After an extensive investigation and piloting multiple workload automation products, MSA selected the Control-M digital business automation platform, including Control-M Managed File Transfer, because it has deep integration and support for Hadoop and databases, and robust self-service capabilities.

Because Control-M can automate and orchestrate so many elements of workflow development, scheduling, execution, and monitoring, IMS was able to consolidate process steps and significantly streamline its number of workflows.

The Results

Automating complex workflows with Control-M enabled MSA to:

  • Streamline tens of thousands of jobs
  • Reduce failure rates from 20 percent to 0.5 percent
  • Cut 12 to 18 hours out of the time required to process key weekly client deliverables
  • Reassign approximately 15 percent of its 150-employee operations team to perform more value-added tasks
  • Take advantage of Hadoop to extend its market leadership and win new clients

“Control-M allowed us to expand into new revenue-generating opportunities. With our Hadoop implementation, we can do more with clients’ point-of-sale data and can take on new client work.”

— Brandon Johnson, Senior Technical Manager, MSA

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