Case Study: Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) achieves 2–3× faster ETL and timely, accurate reporting with Talend Data Integration

Designing the future of the institute with data at their fingertips

The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) is a multi‑campus college educating students in fashion and design with about 6,000 full‑time students and campuses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Orange County. FIDM struggled with an aging, unreliable ETL tool (slow nightly runs, poor vendor support and difficulty adding data) and urgently needed faster, dependable access to marketing, financial and student information for operational reporting and decision‑making.

FIDM adopted the Smart i BI appliance—bundling Talend Data Integration with DB2 Web Query on IBM System i—using Talend’s GUI and transformation components to extract, cleanse and load data from DB2 and SQL Server into a new data mart. The integrated solution shortened ETL processing by 2–3×, made BI development more intuitive and enabled faster, accurate reports and greater executive satisfaction.

FIDM

Roxanne Reynolds-Lair

CIO