Scalability

The company’s clients want their data in just about every possible format and type. The same is true for the tax offices to which they return data. Pervasive gives ZC Sterling the tools to handle the required range and complexity of data.

Efficiency

McPherson’s team has created thousands of reusable transformation maps to meet the demands of projects, and found that their efficiencies improved as a result. At year’s end, McPherson’s team often faced enormous deadlines to meet varying data requirements. After employing Pervasive, and its reusable maps, he had “the easiest fourth quarter” his team ever had, and this trend continues.

Usability, Flexibility and Speed

ZC Sterling can repurpose maps to meet deadlines and their volume increases are now better managed.

Printable Format

ZC Sterling turned to Pervasive when sychronizing all tax assessments of every county tax office in the U.S.

ZC Sterling offers innovative tax processing solutions that provide new ways for mortgage lenders to control tax procurement and payment processes. The company delivers process integration with the lender’s system using a “single system” approach that eliminates data synchronization, conversion, and warehousing issues.

In 2004, the company found itself looking for a scalable, quick-ramping data conversion and data warehousing solution with the ability to synchronize tax assessments from every county tax office in the U.S. to its customers’ requirements, and then back again to any respective tax office in its specified format. Following a careful analysis of costs and benefits, the company chose Pervasive to supply the data conversion and data warehousing solution to accomplish this high-volume, highly exacting cross-retrieval task.

Scale: 22,000 taxing authorities; Staff: Small; Pressure: High

The scale of the project was huge. There are well over 22,000 taxing authorities in the U.S. One county alone—L.A. County—had well over 2.2 million records. What was needed was a data conversion and data warehousing solution that would allow many transformation maps and could employ numerous data connectors that needed to reach data across a disparate data range, from COBOL files to SQL systems. The tools also had to be straightforward, quickly taught to personnel, and be used by nontechnical types such as business analysts. The tool also needed to allow data reformatting to get the job done the best way.

Adam McPherson, ZC Sterling’s team lead for data conversion, supervised a four-person staff that would conduct the work. McPherson tried using another company’s product, but he found it complex and frustrating. His company also found itself paying a lot of money for support. “We started shopping around and then came across Pervasive. We were sold on Pervasive. The salesman told us to take the free trial software to town, which we did. It worked well, and their team was right there to help us.”

The pressures faced by ZC Sterling staff were intense. A mistake while converting the tax data for its clients, the largest companies in the mortgage-lending sector, could prove costly. Even more, the tax offices could hand out penalties, if tax data returned was inaccurate.

Pervasive facilitates fast, high-validation ramp-up

Pervasive offered a superior data conversion and data warehousing solution, and a sales, services, and support team that facilitated a fast, high-validation ramp-up. In fact, the data conversion team was up and running on the Pervasive-powered project within a few weeks. ZC Sterling will meet the data demands of its clients and the tax offices it works with by using a data conversion and warehousing solution that simplifies complex mapping to achieve high success in cross-retrieving activities. "We have to meet a number of exacting specs, and Pervasive allows us to create the maps to achieve this. In many ways, Pervasive has given us a lot of flexibility to meet a number of data demands, and to grow the business,” Team Lead Adam McPherson states.

Small team now takes on ever more volume, with Pervasive fueling data conversion

ZC Sterling can meet the data demands of its clients and the tax offices it works with by using a data conversion and warehousing solution that simplifies complex mapping to achieve high success in cross-retrieving activities. More than 2,900 maps are now actively used by ZC Sterling to extract and transform high volumes of data on a daily basis for nearly any situation or data environment. Team Lead Adam McPherson said, “We have to meet a number of exacting specs, and Pervasive allows us to create the maps to achieve this. In many ways, Pervasive has given us a lot of flexibility to meet a number of data demands, and to grow the business.”

ZC Sterling management and McPherson’s small team are happy. According to McPherson, “We have taken on around 40 percent more volume with the same staff level. From a data conversion perspective, the amount of output per second is very high and validation is solid. We now give ourselves a two-day turnaround on each project to be safe. In reality, however, we can typically turn a project in one hour.”  

Pervasive provides expanding usefulness and upgrades are easy

Other ZC Sterling divisions, including the production and IT teams, now use the Pervasive Data Conversion tools. The tools also have allowed improved business analysis. In addition, the company finds that upgrades are easy. “Our previous product vendor just would not allow us to upgrade, which really bothered us,” Team Lead Adam McPherson notes, “To be honest, there is such an easy flow to ramp-up now. We’re very comfortable with Pervasive–we really like working with their software and their staff. We’ll continue to upgrade with Pervasive.”