The Unicorn SystemÔ has been used at numerous Fortune 1000 and government enterprises worldwide. The Case Studies below shed light on some of the ways in which the product has solved management, integration, and quality issues surrounding data.

Data Management Case Study - Insurance Customer
The Business & Technical Problems
This enterprise has a large and important customer with 100,000+ employees. It must send the customer a single file on a daily basis that lists employees who are scheduled to receive a (disability) payment based upon a specific employee benefits package. The process takes 2 days to complete and the application analysts are uncertain why. Moreover, the customer is overpaying its employees without any choice in the matter, thereby wasting money. Change is not recognized or tracked and the impact of the 2-day delay is not understood. This inability to identify how data is being processed by which applications or business units was solved using the Unicorn System.

The Unicorn Solution
The Unicorn System made the data-to-application interdependencies and relationships known and capable of being tracked by allowing the enterprise to compare and contrast the various data assets. This was accomplished by mapping the entire domain and identifying the bottleneck through measurement of each data segment on the Information Model's semantic links. The problem can be boiled down to one of metadata: how is the data affecting this delay being used and in which data sources and applications can it be found? By identifying which processes/files/sources are being driven by this data, the Unicorn System was able to solve a real business issue stemming from a data management problem.

The Customer Benefit
This Fortune 100 enterprise is now able to pass on real cost savings to its own customers by stopping unnecessary payments. Stopping the bottleneck in work processes also ensures that all data relating to this one project is being sufficiently monitored to avoid future problems. Finally, business and IT now share a common and clear understanding of the data's meaning and can both (a) avoid future conflicts and (b) grow together to advance causes from within either domain.

Data Integration Case Study - Manufacturing Customer
The Business & Technical Problems
This Unicorn customer was losing money and contracts as a direct result of production environment in which inventory capacities remained uncontrolled and immeasurable. Both excesses and shortages went unknown and resulted in unplanned storage costs and missed shipments, respectively. Brand damage and client dissatisfaction were only two of the downstream business issues occurring as a result of this situation. Technically, this state of affairs arose due to implicit discrepancies that existed between operational & planning systems.

The Unicorn Solution
The Unicorn System was able - within a span of 2 weeks - to scope the business domain and business problem with the Company, capture the desired business view in an Information Model, semantically map the two main underlying relational data sources to the Information Model, infer transformations in ANSI SQL to compare between the incompatible databases, and then finally execute the SQL query to compare between the semantically-different sources in order to produce an accurate list of discrepancies.

The Customer Benefit
The company now leverages a common lens of shipping systems and as a result has an improved and comprehensive handle on its inventory. And while the company’s systems could have been compared in the traditional way using point-to-point hand-coded transformations, this solution would not have provided insight into the underlying business issues. It also would be awkward to maintain and would not scale to a broader data quality initiative in manufacturing.

Data Quality Case Study - Services Customer
The Business & Technical Problems
This Unicorn customer had difficulties with presenting different information from its American & European divisions. Inaccurate business rules were the culprit preventing comparison. As a result, business decisions could not be accurately made, both tactical and strategic. Furthermore, no knowledge of updates in the main operational database was known or could be shared. This inability to compare business rules, relationships and overlap between the Enterprise's two divisions was delaying genuine business integration. Finally, groups relying on the operational data got frustrated from having to wait 4-6 weeks for an answer from the central data services group within the company.

The Unicorn Solution
In this instance, the Unicorn System was used to construct and then publish a shared and agreed-upon Information Model of the operational data store managed by the company. This Information Model was constructed through interviews of Company personnel within each division that were used to supplement the data already included in the data store. Data consistency was another result, with the Information Model ensuring high quality data was being used and built upon.

The Customer Benefit
The Company now possesses an accurate and accessible list of its overall number of utilization statistics for the individual units it tracks internationally. As a direct result, management’s decision-making capabilities are now greatly enhanced, with the business able to rely on technical data while planning for the future and identifying ongoing problems. Each subsidiary continues to work on its data in the way it always has, yet overall management can easily compare and understand company-wide issues going forward.