Real-Time Access to Data Improves Time-to-Insights for EFCO Corp.
We evaluated virtually every other data replication product on the market and Syniti came up as the winner on price, functionality and usability.”
Project Background
EFCO Corporation’s headquarters in Monett, Missouri support an IT staff of nearly 90 people. EFCO’s IT department is responsible for the company’s major technology systems including software, hardware, network and telephone systems. Part of this responsibility includes managing data traffic between different systems that support EFCO’s analytics, manufacturing/finance and product information.
Company Background
EFCO Corporation is well known for its glass windows, sliding doors and curtain wall systems. The company also manufactures aluminum window units, entrances and storefronts for commercial architectural applications. EFCO’s projects have included historical replication work, custom design work, as well as new construction. The company is headquartered and operates its manufacturing facilities in Monett, Missouri.
It has service centers in Springfield, Missouri; Bolingbrook, Illinois; Verona, Virginia; and Henderson, Nevada. George Eberle and William Terry Fuldner founded the company as EFCO Product Company in 1951; it was incorporated as EFCO Corporation in 1953. In 2017, it was purchased by Apogee Enterprises, Inc.
Before using Syniti we had no means to easily transfer and replicate data between our dissimilar computer platforms. Syniti allows us to easily and cost- effectively replicate data between these platforms. Syniti was the first and is still the only data replication product in use at EFCO."
Why Syniti
EFCO established various database silos, but discovered that there were instances where they needed to source data from a different system in order to answer queries, run reports and still be able to support various business applications involved in their fenestration manufacturing process. In addition, they needed to do this in real-time to support sales, customers and executive management.
EFCO Corporation decided that they needed to seek a solution that would help them access data quickly yet relieve the overhead from directly communicating with their production systems. Much of the reporting required direct access to these manufacturing systems, and this affected the processing power of the systems. Adding overhead to the production systems meant that manufacturing processes slowed down, and hence hampered down inventory availability and reduced sales.
With this overhead, both the production system and the reporting applications took a long time to process, making IT staff and business users frustrated and concerned with the lack of timely updates to data. EFCO decided to establish a system that would move data (replicate it) from their IBM i (formerly AS/400) to a SQL Server database, and access the data from the remote system for reporting. EFCO went on a hunt to find a data replication solution, searching for products that would support replications between their IBM i and MS SQL Server. “We evaluated virtually every other data replication product on the market and Syniti came up as the winner on price, functionality and usability,” explained Larry Romireo.
EFCO established various database silos, but discovered that there were instances where they needed to source data from a different system in order to answer queries, run reports and still be able to support various business applications involved in their fenestration manufacturing process. In addition, the needed to do this in real-time to support sales, customers and executive management.
“We repeated our evaluation again a year ago, comparing Syniti against every other replication product on the market. Price, functionality, ease of installation and maintainability were compared. Syniti was the clear winner in that re-evaluation as well.” EFCO appreciates Syniti’s ease of implementation and ongoing maintenance and are impressed by Syniti’s methods to handle replications from the IBM i to SQL Server. “Without any prior experience with data replication, we had Syniti’s Data Replication installed and working in less than four hours by simply reading the installation documentation,” said Romireo. “We have been able to do all but the most complex tasks by simply reading the documentation.”
“Syniti has largely minimized our data replication tasks to ‘drag-and-drop’ quick set-up so our programmers can now spend more time writing and maintaining applications and less time trying to get data transferred between different platforms."
Implementation Highlights
Syniti’s was connected to the IBM i and established continuous, real-time data replications to MS SQL Server, where reporting and BI could take place without impacting the production system. With Syniti’s Change Data Capture functionality, data could be updated in real-time 24 hours a day, at a very fast pace. In addition, with Syniti’s ability to read the transaction logs (journals) of the IBM i, there was little-to-no impact on the IBM i, while delivering updates to MS SQL Server as they happened.
EFCO Corporation uses Syniti’s to replicate IBM DB2 for i data on an IBM i to Microsoft SQL Server databases running on Windows 2008. The data replication process supports the data requirements demanded from applications such as Cognos (Reporting and Analytics), KBM (ERP) and proprietary EFCO applications.
Results
Syniti takes the processing load of EFCO’s manufacturing system on the IBM i and effectively distributes access to the database. Reports and applications have returned data much faster, reducing processing time from hours to minutes. User satisfaction has improved due to the large decrease in system response and processing time. EFCO is now able to access real-time data for Business Intelligence, ERP and configuration applications, making them all more effective at a faster pace.
“Syniti has largely minimized our data replication tasks to ‘drag-and-drop’ quick set-up so our programmers can now spend more time writing and maintaining applications and less time trying to get data transferred between different platforms,” explained Romireo. “We were most pleased with the ease with which data replications could be set up and understood, as well as the product’s cost and reliability,” he added. “We would overwhelmingly recommend Syniti to anyone.”
EFCO appreciated the support from Syniti as well. According to Romireo, “Technical support has always been excellent. We use it as a comparison to other vendors’ tech support services, e.g. ‘I wish the support was as good as we get from Syniti’s Customer Support.’” EFCO Corporation says Syniti excelled in all comparisons to other data integration software solutions for their needs, not just once — but again, after a second complete evaluation four years later.