WOW Why did we wait soooo long?
August 07, 2015

WOW Why did we wait soooo long?

Don Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

6.2.11

Overall Satisfaction with Centerprise Data Integrator

We mainly use Centerprise for two areas. Our team takes other systems' data and transforms that into our format for our developed software. We use Centerprise to pull the necessary information out of the other systems' reports to validate the completion of a conversion. We also use it to extract data from the other systems' reports to do the actual data transformation into our format when the other system's provider will not supply data for the conversion.
  • Because the standard reports from one system to another are not always compatible - Centerprise allows us to create a reusable template to standardize the information that we use to validate conversions. Standardizing the reporting data from two systems is an awesome strength that can be developed out of Centerprise.
  • We have had several instances that the supplier of software to a customer will not provide data out of their system for conversion. Sometimes it is a timing issue (you will need to wait 6 months for this) and other times it is a cost issue. We have been able to convert accounting and payroll information into our system just based on reports out of the legacy system. Because we can save the template we can now convert anyone on that legacy system without the involvement of the legacy system's software provider.
  • We have several support calls that have been labeled as to be done in the future. One is the reading of the File Definition in AcuCobol with the sign trailing in a numeric field. The handling of this would help us in several areas but we have been able to develop a work around at this point.
  • Some of the child/overlap configuration for the "RMD" seems awkward.
  • We have seen that the use of this package saved us 2 hours per conversion but now since the templates are already developed it is saving us more. This reduces our lead time for conversions, and increases our efficiencies as a conversion team.
  • We have four licenses and in one conversion this year it allowed us to do a conversion that would not have been done. This conversion generated more than enough money to cover the cost of these four licenses for the entire year. The customer is ecstatic about the information that we were able to pull out of their reports and most of all the upper management of our company had their socks shocked off of them. Since the supplier of the software for this customer would not provide data to us for a conversion our upper management was going to cancel the sale to this customer, unless the customer was going to build our system from scratch. We were able to provide nearly a complete accounting and payroll conversion to this customer all from the data on their reports thanks to centerprise.
Some of the other packages' price was too high for the budget provided for our team which eliminated those. Others had a requirement that they needed to be connected into our network. Because we have so much sensitive information in our network we could not allow them this access and that eliminated them. We had several other trial periods with other packages and they did not have the flexibility of data format input or output. We have used SQL, reports, csv, Excel, COBOL, database, and fixed length sources in conversion in less than 1.5 years. We continue to see ways that Centerprise could have been used and are developing them. The standardization of comparison data out of different reports that have different formats was something we did not think about when we selected this package.
Because you can save the template for extracting data from a report it is a great time saver.