Leading IT and Business Consulting Firm Achieves 10X Reporting Efficiency in Less Than a Month with Precision Tuning
Spinning the consulting and technological services has many operational dependencies that demand ultimate speed for daily processes. A Canadian leader who serves most influential tech enterprises with its services undergone a series of delays up to longing hours in essential management processes that guide daily project and expense decisions.
To reduce processing speeds from hours to minutes, our specialized team of consultants involved to perform a large-scale surgical optimization approach. The approach tuned Oracle Exadata performance by leveraging its Smart Scan capabilities in under 30 days with no code rewrites or no redesigning of architecture. Embark on the journey where the customer has benefited from longer hours of operations to just in minutes.
A Puzzle about Leveraging Performance
The leading Canadian player is among the well-known technology and business consulting enterprises in the world with over half a century industry leadership history. With a captivating market value of USD 20 billion and thousands of global workforces, the company counts on timely, accurate, and continuous insights into processing internal operations and client-related engagements.
To align the wall of possibilities for scale and complexity of their consulting operations, the enterprise adopted Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Oracle Exadata, a duo combination with engineering excellence that delivers high throughput, transactional intelligence, and enterprise-grade availability.
The goal was to modernize their legacy systems by embracing the capabilities of this duo combination. But the scenarios seemed underperforming, never working as expected. The new environment introduced the large consulting firm to slaggy processes. In this enterprise, where operations depend hugely on hour-by-hour updates, this has compromised operational alignment across the organization.
The company needed technical expertise to promise maximum system functionality.
Upgraded Infrastructure with Underwhelming Results
The latest EBS + Exadata implementation realized a gap: internal teams had limited experience with this stack and no familiarity with leveraging the complete potential of Exadata.
- Undermined Performance Capabilities: Despite Exadata encompasses the specialized hardware optimization for database workloads, the deployed configuration wasn’t utilizing the platform’s essence including smart scan, storage index efficiencies, columnar projections, and hybrid processing.
- Misaligned Reporting Processes: Essential EBS modules designed for project accounting and expense management rely heavily on databases. Any misconfigured indexing across several high-volume tables turned the system into slower with less efficient execution paths.
- Ineffective Rendering of Critical Use Cases: The environment was expected to support hourly updates, real-time reporting, expense insights, and executive dashboards. With reports exceeding up to four hours in running time, the business could no longer invest into any one of these tools for daily decision-making.
- No Rewrites or Redesigning of the Stack: The organization needed an immediate fix that required no chances in the code while enhancing the EBS integrity, skipping lengthy regression cycles, and minimized disruption. This is where our experts were called to stabilize, tune, and elevate performance.
Leveraging the Features of Exadata – Smart Scan and Intelligence
Starting with a deep, forensic evaluation of Oracle EBS and Exadata environment that entailed on how the system executed queries, processed workloads, and consumed compute/storage cycles, we derived two clarifications:
- Certain indexes in the EBS database were forcing the optimizer to bypass Smart Scan.
- Exadata’s high-performance storage features were barely being touched.
This led to a powerful but high-impact solution – bits of changes in the Exadata so that the processing happens faster.
Step 1: Our key experts traced crucial reporting queries and observed that index-driven plans were causing block scans, CPU spikes, and inefficient data retrieval patterns.
Step 2: We have implemented selective removal of indexes on specific high-volume tables that allowed Exadata to route queries through:
- Smart Scan
- Storage Indexes
- Offloading Filtering
- Hybrid Columnar Processing
This approach directed the system to process datasets at the storage level rather than taking them into compute nodes.
Step 3: With no change in code, infrastructure, or required to redesign the ecosystem, the solution was purely configuration-driven, metadata safe, reversible, and low risky.
Step 4: Once the Smart Scan worked proactively, following changes observed:
- Queries ran at unprecedented speeds
- Report generated in minutes
- Storage-level optimizations came in automatically
The enabling of Exadata capabilities resulted in massive impact that include:
- More than four hours of execution trimmed down to under 1 minute, powering 10X faster processing speeds.
- The entire solution was effective within a month with zero interruptions.
- Consulting management teams experienced faster project oversight by 2X, expense reconciliation by three times, and better resource allocation.
- Complete ROI on existing investments as there were no additional hardware purchases, licensing costs, or redevelopment costs.
- Exadata Smart Scan enabled the EBS environment to remain future-proof for higher workloads, complex reporting structures, and handling year-on-year growth in data volumes.
Translated Transformation Through Tuning and Optimization
The biggest breakthroughs can be possible not only by investing in the new technologies but by unlocking the technology that’s residing. Our ability to in-depth analysis and over a decade of experience in Exadata implementations has transformed this hi-tech enterprise to function at world-class level. Owning the cloud and infrastructure implementations for global enterprises, we bring tailored approaches by redefining your possibilities, exploring the extensive features, and powering growth through optimization and scalability.
