PROSA Primed to Exceed 700 Million Credit Transactions a Year

Challenges
Promoción y Operación, S.A. de C.V. (PROSA), the largest clearinghouse for electronic bank and credit card transactions in Latin America, wanted to incorporate ISO standards into its IT operations to ensure operational excellence. Because the company manages one of the world's largest electronic clearinghouses, it needs it to be available 24 hours each day. To achieve these goals, PROSA sought a database that would ensure high availability and facilitate process automation and infrastructure standardization.

Solution
PROSA moved from a mainframe environment to Oracle Database and Sun Solaris. Standardizing on Oracle Database simplified IT processes to the point that the company requires 70% fewer IT staff to maintain the databases that run its clearinghouse, electronic banking, credit card functions, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, which include Oracle Financials.

"We chose Oracle because it offers excellent support, and its products are easy to integrate with other vendors’ products," said José Luis Andrade, director of the system business unit for PROSA. "Oracle Database helped automate and simplify processes, enterprisewide. The upshot is that, despite the rising costs for most goods and services and a phenomenal increase in the number of transactions we process, our transaction costs have gone down steadily since deployment--17 % since 1997, so that today our customers pay only 23 cents of a Mexican peso for each Mexican peso paid in 1997. In addition Oracle Database reduced our overall operational costs, so we are able to pass along the savings to our customers."

PROSA’s Oracle Databases now process 700 million credit transactions a year, Andrade said, and will be easy to scale easily as the company grows. He also credited Oracle Database's efficiency in helping the company achieve ISO 9001 and gain recognition for operational excellence by several organizations. For example, the Asia Pacific Quality Organization, an international organization of professional societies, singled out PROSA as a "world class company " based on the efficiency of its operations.

Benefits • Enabled the company to increase in the number of electronic transactions per year from 150 million to 700 million • Reduced cost per transaction by 17% since 1997 • Lowered database management costs by requiring seven fewer database administrators • Shortened time needed to complete electronic clearinghouse transactions from four hours to 80 minutes • Assures around-the-clock availability Copyright © 2004 Oracle Corporation. All Rights Reserved.