Global Human Resource Solutions Provider

Employee services like payroll and benefits payments are essential to everyone. If a paycheck is missed, rents and mortgages could go unpaid, electricity and hydro may be cut, and groceries are sacrificed. With clients ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies in over one hundred countries, one human-resource solutions provider understood that ensuring the continuous operation of the processes behind these services is critical.

Like most organizations dealing with talent challenges, this provider was too short staffed to comfortably support their large workload. And with over 30 application databases to support across as many Db2 subsystems, their small team of database administrators was struggling. Proactively managing Db2 for z/OS performance with SQL and index reviews for each application, without the use of tools, was next to impossible.

Result

IBM Db2 Query Monitor for z/OS (Query Monitor) was one of the solutions they selected to help reduce the amount of time needed to resolve Db2 performance issues. Query Monitor is a query analyzer that identifies potential queries that can be fine-tuned to run more efficiently. By using Query Monitor alongside IBM Query Workload Tuner for z/OS, the time required to investigate poorly performing jobs, recommend improvements, and identify a solution now averages less than a day—a fraction of the time originally needed.

The HR-solutions provider also implemented IBM DB2 Query Management Facility for z/OS® (QMF), developed in partnership with IBM and Rocket® Software. QMF is an analytics platform that creates reports and dashboards that customers use to gain real-time insights across all their applications. With over 400 users among DBAs, systems programmers, support, finance, payroll, sales, and application development, QMF is essential for tuning and keeping the Db2 subsystems running efficiently. Users can easily access QMF queries, reports, and a suite of dashboards from their web browsers to keep track of key performance, storage, and transaction stats for their database applications.

Query Monitor and QMF helped improve data management and analytics capabilities for the HR-solutions company, but they were also crucial to meeting the organization’s overall digital transformation goals. With more organizations moving toward a hybrid-cloud model, the provider can rely on Query Monitor and QMF to serve as the secure foundation for integrated on-premises and public-cloud environments.