No CTRM implementation is static. From vendor-driven code releases to customizations to new reports and configurations from users, the list tends to go on and on. This is a common theme across a variety of customers, regardless of industry and region: more functionality, more users, more processes, more customizations, more complexity, and higher system utilization around the clock. And yet, much like a car that we drive and need all the time also needs its maintenance, few take the time to do just that. With a legacy platform, as the majority are in the marketplace, few would not benefit from a look under the hood.
Has your system been designed in a scalable way to accommodate and grow with your business? Have system-native functionalities been leveraged instead of applying custom solutions just to make a process work? Can the system, and all the processes interacting with it, be fine-tuned or further optimized?
Now is the time to take a closer look! In the CTRM space, an ounce of prevention genuinely is worth more than a pound of cure.
The following checklist includes a series of questions to better understand when you should consider a CTRM system health check. If more than a couple of these questions are true for your firm, chances are it is worth the minor investment of time to reap the benefits of knowing your options.
1. Business Process Optimization and Tuning
- Do you receive complaints from business users around processes that require too much time or manual steps?
- Are you unsure whether the various system core functionalities have been designed and configured in the right way?
- Do you have issues planning and scheduling end of day processes due to their duration and impact to the business?
2. Data Archiving Management
- Do you have a strategy around data and data growth?
- Do you archive and/or purge properly and regularly enough?
- Do you need clarification on how to monitor and investigate long-running queries or deadlocks?
- Are you applying required indexes and rebuilding them as frequently as possible so as not to impact ongoing business in the system?
The data tables below in Figure 1 are commonly the largest in Allegro customer databases. Often times these tables have redundant or outdated data that can be safely archived to free up a significant amount of space on the database server.
3. System Load Management
- Do you regularly review server manager config keys set up for optimal business processes?
- Are system EOD processes continuously and painfully delayed every morning?
- Are valuations not finishing on time by the start of the business day? What impact does this have on business processes and are your users struggling with performance during working hours?
- Do you have EOD processes for one office location decreasing performance of the system for the users in another office location during their working hours?
- Do you need a strategy to dynamically allocate hardware resources during peak time of the system?
- Do you wish to prioritize some critical background processes over others and able to run them only on dedicated servers and not following the grid core logic?
- If your queue is fully busy during some hours and you wish to manage and prioritise the load or you need a process to be 7X24 with high availability, that can be achieved easier than you might anticipate.
- Do you envision a custom pre-check process in order to validate the execution of EOD processes only if certain conditions are met?
The image below captures application server configuration within Allegro. Each environment and situation is unique but ultimately the goal is to utilize application servers to the best of their ability. Without proper configuration and coordination between application servers, performance of an environment will suffer.
4. Development Process Management
- Leveraging a health check can be a great way to improve your development process management – these types of changes reduce complexities, create more effective code and generally make a big impact on the effort and energy one needs to expend on system upgrades.
- Are you unsure on how to implement an efficient process of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) through the system development process?
- Are you willing to integrate the specific system artifacts with standard market tools for CI/CD?
- Are you longing to adopt a fully automated, easy to be configured and fast to be executed tool for regression testing and automatic detection of differences between the same valuation run in two different environments?
If you answered yes to many or any of the above, now is time for a system health check!
We Are Here to Help
Our team has decades of experience working with CTRM systems and have been conducting health checks for energy systems like Allegro, Endur and RightAngle. If you are interested in better tuning your system, we can investigate and suggest plausible solutions. Please reach out!
