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Tutorial: IBM InfoSphere FastTrack Facilitated mapping creation

In this series of modules, you will use IBM® InfoSphere® FastTrack to create an application that identifies customers with high value to your business. You will experience how InfoSphere FastTrack increases the ease and efficiency by which you create mapping specifications. From the specifications, you can generate InfoSphere DataStage® and QualityStage® jobs and reports.

To access the sample data associated with this tutorial, go to <InformationServer_installed_location>/clients/fasttrack/samples.

For this tutorial, you will follow a fictional scenario about the First Midwest company. First Midwest is a financial institution that grew by acquisition. As First Midwest focused on acquisition activities, their competition pulled away several of their high-value customers. These customers were neglected or not treated preferably at First Midwest. Now the priority of First Midwest is to regain its customer base by improving its view of customer data. First Midwest defines two levels of high-value customers. Members who hold more than $100,000 in assets are gold level. Members who hold more than $300,000 in assets are platinum level. First Midwest wants to ensure that gold customers are offered new investment opportunities and that platinum customers are given premium customer service when they call in with issues.

First Midwest has these subsidiaries:
BANK 1
Holds only checking accounts. The data is in one table: BANK1.CHECKING. The table has a number of nonvalid accounts that are identified by the account balance = -999999.
BANK 2
Holds checking and savings accounts. The data is in these tables: BANK2.CUSTOMERS and BANK2.ACCOUNTS. Customers might have checking and savings accounts. Therefore, account balances for both checking and savings accounts must be aggregated to compute the total account balance for a customer. Bank 2 also keeps track of demographic data about customers in a separate table, BANK2.DEMOGRAPHICS.
BANK 3
Holds only savings accounts. The data is in one table: BANK3.SAVINGS.
The following steps illustrate the sequence of actions:
  1. First Midwest created a standard customer database that its subsidiaries use to represent customer data. You will access this database in Module 1, in Lesson 1.2. .
  2. Through the modules, you create specifications and build an application to identify gold and platinum customers for marketing and customer service.
  3. The application moves customer information from the bank subsidiaries into a standardized customer model.
  4. The standardized information is used to build information about platinum customers for the customer service department and information about gold customers for marketing.
  5. You then integrate the customer data from the BANK 3 subsidiary into the database containing the standardized customer information.
These actions are reflected in Figure 1 .
Figure 1. First Midwest subsidiaries and the plan for how the data flows.
First Midwest subsidiaries and how the data flows. Gold customers have account balances of greater than $100,000 and platinum customers have greater than $300,000.
These tasks are required to build the application that identifies high-value customers::
  1. Extract customer information from the BANK 1 subsidiary and map it to the BANK.CUSTOMERS table in the bankdemo database.
  2. Extract customer information from the BANK 2 subsidiary and map it to the BANK.CUSTOMERS table in the bankdemo database.
  3. Identify gold customers as level B and platinum customers as level A. Standardize customer name and address information and add a business term that defines a level of service.
  4. Move gold customer data appropriate for marketing (such as name, address, and gender) from the bankdemo.BANK.CUSTOMERS table to the bankdemo.BANK.MARKETING table and move platinum customer data appropriate for customer service (such as name, address, and tax ID) from the bankdemo.BANK.CUSTOMERS table to bankdemo.BANK.CUSTSERVICE table.
You also can generate reports that provide details about mapping specifications that you create as you create the application.

Learning objectives

By completing the modules, you will learn about these functions:

Time required

In the first module, you set up your environment, and the time required depends on your current environment. The remaining modules each take about 40-50 minutes to complete.

System requirements

The following components and applications must be installed on your system. In Module 1, you prepare for the tutorial.

Modules in this tutorial

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