Israel Defense Forces on Informatica

CASE STUDY<strong>Israel</strong> <strong>Defense</strong> <strong>Forces</strong> on Informatica

Case Study<strong>Israel</strong> <strong>Defense</strong> <strong>Forces</strong> on InformaticaRobust Functionality DeliveringSignificant BenefitsAccording to Lt. Col. Yossi, PowerCenter’sease of use and robust functionalitydelivered benefits far beyond theexpectations that IDF set during its projectdesign phase. Informatica PowerCenter:• Reduced the number of man-years bya factor of five to six. The project wascompleted with 10 man-years of laborversus an estimated 60.• Decreased the project duration fromthree years to one.• Enabled completion of thesignificantly-expanded project scope(all service data versus Army dataonly) within their new one-yeartimeline and 25 percent below budget.•Supplied data quality validation thatcleansed/standardized more than 100million records.• Was readily learned and adopted by20 programmers—some no older thanage 18.The storied history of the <strong>Israel</strong>i <strong>Defense</strong> <strong>Forces</strong> (IDF) is marked by milestonesrecognizable to even casual observers of the Middle East: The Six-day War of 1967... the Raid on Entebbe in 1976 ... the 1981 airstrike that crippled an Iraqi nuclearreactor.In 2004, the <strong>Israel</strong>i military achieved anothermilestone that won’t make the history books,but nevertheless ranks as a significantachievement that improves the IDF’s ability tomobilize forces and materiel with greaterspeed, precision, and efficiency.This time, the theater was not the GolanHeights or the Gaza Strip or the airport atEntebbe, Uganda. It was the datamanagement environment of the IDFTechnology and Logistics Directorate—a sprawl of incompatible applications thatfrustrated the Army’s efforts to manage itsequipment and resources.“We had a forest of systems throughoutLogistics,” said Lt. Col. Yossi, the Technologyand Logistics Directorate head of EnterpriseResource Planning Project Administration,based in Tel Aviv. “Each was a separatesystem that would speak its own language.We could do the job, but not in a fluent way.”The IDF Technology and Logistics Directorateembarked on an ambitious initiative thatwould migrate Army data from mainframe andlegacy applications to a set of SAP R/3,selecting Informatica® PowerCenter® as thedata integration system.A first phase of the initiative aimed to migratedata from five key areas—spare parts,medical supplies, gas and oil, constructionmaterials, and office materials—to SAP R/34.7, which was running under Linux on anIBM zSeries 990 with a DB2 database.In production since April 2004, accessed bymany users, and affecting more Armypersonnel, the integrated SAP logisticsenvironment is helping the Army improvesupply chain efficiency, reduce costs, andfine-tune operations based on a single,consolidated view of its data.After quickly discovering the comprehensivecapabilities of PowerCenter, the IDF hasbroadened the scope of the originalintegration initiative, and are now integratingdata from all service branches (Army, Navyand Air Force) using Informatica.PowerCenter: Above and Beyondthe Call of Duty“Originally, we thought we would have toexpend 60 years of human work to performthe conversion,” said Lt. Col. Yossi. “In reality,it only took 10 man-years. With PowerCenter,conversion was faster, data movement wasfaster, and because of the way Informaticauses mappings, we were able to identify dataerrors at the source level.”Among the first objectives was to examine themainframe and legacy information for dataquality—redundancy, inconsistent definitions,and differing codes for the same materialsacross disparate systems.“We were about to install a new system, anddidn’t want the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’problem,” Lt. Col. Yossi said. “We wanted todo everything we could to ensure the newsystem would be as clean as possible.”The IDF team had created a customapplication to perform data cleansing.PowerCenter provides the capability toseamlessly integrate such externalapplications as custom transformations.The highly visual Informatica PowerCenter<strong>Israel</strong> <strong>Defense</strong> <strong>Forces</strong> on Informatica3

development GUI provided a foundation forprogrammers to customize 24 mappings touse this external program as simply anothertransformation. PowerCenter moved data fromsource-to-target and cleansed data in onesmooth operation. This exposed an alarmingquantity of issues with source-level qualitythat would otherwise have gone undetected,Lt. Col. Yossi said. In some cases, the IDFused PowerCenter’s Advanced ExternalProcedures feature to streamline the mostcomplex mappings.The results were amazing, Lt. Col. Yossi said.Once data was migrated from mainframe andlegacy systems to SAP R/3 instances inmultiple locations across <strong>Israel</strong>. Moreover,cleansing and deduplication reduced datavolumes by roughly 20 percent, saving onstorage requirements.Informatica/SAP CompatibilityStreamlines IntegrationIn conversion and migration, the IDF tookadvantage of native SAP interoperability inPowerCenter and PowerConnect for SAP R/3.Compatibility with SAP’s ABAP code and itsIDOCS structured text file format simplifiedand accelerated processes that otherwisewould have required time-consuming manualcoding and far longer load times, Lt. Col.Yossi said.For instance, PowerCenter’s partitioning andparallel write technology enabled the IDF tosimultaneously load multiple data sets intoSAP R/3, overcoming SAP’s limitation inloading one record at a time.“After we wrote the mappings, PowerCenterdid the work for us,” Lt. Col. Yossi said. “Itmeant we didn’t have to write any programsfor moving the data off the main system.”Logical mappings designed to move the datawere easily configured to physically execute ina parallel fashion. This elegant separation oflogical and physical within the PowerCenterdesign and execution environmenttremendously improved and simplified thedevelopment process.PowerCenter’s exceptional ease of use meantthat young programmers with no experiencein mainframe sourcing or complex migrationscould “connect the dots” to create andupdate business objects in SAP R/3, such ascreate new order, update material details,etc.“These are young soldiers, 18 years old,” Lt.Col. Yossi said. “We didn’t even really teachthem how to use PowerCenter—we just gavethem the manual and told them they neededto know the system and how to operate it.” Indesigning the system, the IDF capitalized onthe expertise of Informatica personnel andthe Tel Aviv-based systems integrator, AmanComputers.For Army personnel who manage a vastsupply of materials, the benefits are equallynotable. By delivering a consolidated view ofdata, managers are better equipped to trackcosts, calibrate inventory, and managestorage facilities—and even monitor suchdetails as the expiration dates on certainmedical supplies, Lt. Col. Yossi noted.“It enables our management to look at amaterial master across all of theorganization,” he said. “We can speak onelanguage, and that means we can have fewerpeople taking care of the system and morepeople devoted to other tasks.”Component-Based Reusability forFuture IntegrationA key dividend from the project is that the IDFnow has repeatable, component-basedPowerCenter mappings that may be costeffectivelyreused as the Technology andLogistics Directorate looks to build on itssuccess with additional data integrationinitiatives.The SAP migration that went live in April2004 tackled five of 15 key functional areasfor the military—spare parts, medicalsupplies, gas and oil, construction materials,and office materials. By 2006, the IDFexpects to have migrated to SAP R/3 data onhuman resources, communications, vehiclemaintenance, fuel depot management, andmanufacturing of the 60-ton Merkava tank,the battlefield mainstay of <strong>Israel</strong>i defense.“These expanded systems will add many newusers to the SAP R/3 systems.” Lt. Col. Yossisaid. At the same time, the rollout enablesthe Army to reduce costs by retiring an arrayof mainframe and legacy systems, and byreducing the number of specialized IT staffrequired to run legacy systems.Beside streamlining its operationalapplications, the Technology and LogisticsDivision is also looking to InformaticaPowerCenter and SAP to team up for datainsight and analysis with a data warehouse,based on SAP BW (Business Warehouse).Scheduled to go live in 2005, the system isexpected to use PowerCenter to load datafrom R/3 operational systems to the SAP BWwarehouse. PowerCenter 7.1.1 is integratedwith the native BW load system, BusinessContent Integration (BCI). PowerCenter is ableto invoke the BCI system which initiatesexecution of customized data load routinesfrom R/3 to BW. This supports both initialand incremental data load.The project has not gone unnoticed by IDFbrass. After tackling data integrationthroughout the Army, IDF commanders arelooking to expand the effort to cover the AirForce and Navy, as well.4

Case StudyTechnical Details of the IDFImplementationMuch of the data focused on spare parts andthus entailed loading tremendous volumes viathe IDocs DEBMAS (customer master),CREMAS (vendor master), and BLAORD(contracts). PowerCenter loaded over 46million records into R/3 during the initial loadprocess. PowerCenter loaded IDOCS inparallel into R/3 and was able to achievethroughputs or load rates of approximately 15CREMAS IDocs per second.Much cleansing of the data was requiredduring the initial load process. The IDF teamcreated a custom application to perform datacleansing which was integrated as anAdvanced External Procedure (AEP). This“custom application” included 24 Informaticamappings to cleanse and transform the datafor loading into R/3. These 24 mappingswere reused for many of the applications andare still being used for on-goingsynchronization. Data was extracted from thesource, cleansed by the external program viaan AEP, and restructured as IDocs for loadinginto R/3 in one processing flow (i.e., nointermediate staging required).The IDF application cleansed data, whichtranslated into millions of records in SAP. Inthis whole cleansing and transformationprocess there were only 350 errors, whichwere quickly captured and corrected. The IDFreduced the number of parts tracked in SAPby 25 percent and reduced overall datavolume by 20 percent.SAP became the system of record once it wasfully loaded. In addition to updating R/3 dailyfrom related systems, R/3 in turn dailyupdated external systems. The R/3 system isupdated daily via PowerCenter and SAP’sExchange Infrastructure (XI). PowerCenterperforms batch synchronizations between R/3and the remaining mainframe and AS400systems. PowerCenter daily batch extractsdata from the mainframe DB2 and loads thisinto R/3 via IDocs and by activating BAPIsand custom ABAP programs. Updates to R/3during the day are provided via MQ and XI.Similarly, legacy systems are updated daily byPowerCenter and XI. PowerCenter dailyexecutes ABAP programs (generated byPowerCenter) which provide data files forlegacy updates. PowerCenter loads these filesdirectly into DB2 on the legacy systems.PowerCenter executes the ABAP programs,accesses the data files, and loads these intoR/3 in one mapping or ETL routine. XIupdates the legacy systems throughout theday via IDocs.“As a result of the success of this project, it was decided to execute oneoverall project to provide a global perspective for the Army, the Navy,and the Air Force. The idea is to have one thinking, one methodology,so we will have all information integrated and can influence all threeIDF branches at the same time.”Lt. Col. Yossi, Technology and Logistics DirectorateHead of Enterprise Resource Planning Project Administration<strong>Israel</strong> <strong>Defense</strong> <strong>Forces</strong> on Informatica5

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