Expedien

The Client:
One of the largest avionics, aircraft engines manufacturing and services companies in the world.

Challenges:
Client implemented a global enterprise wide data warehousing and business intelligence system utilizing Business Objects technology. Reporting and data warehousing systems implemented had several challenges including severe performnce issues, lack of scalaibility in case of new reporting needs and extremely slow queries, lack of availability of current data in data warehouse and so on. Data extraction & transformation time window from various sources including SAP was more than 16 hours every day. In addition, source transactional (OLTP) systems also had performance impact because of extract processes running in regular business hours. The customer wanted help to fix these problems. As the project progressed, customer also felt a need for a long-term partner to provide support and maintenance of the data marts.

Our Role:

Expedien developed a strategic framework for an enterprise data warehouse that supports analytical reporting on financial, supply chain, plant maintenance, asset management and sales data from several locations on four continents. This framework standardizes various data items across the enterprise, implements ETL & reporting best practices and enables the client to automate data collection, thus reducing ETL time to 5 hours a day. Expedien delivered a multi tier data warehouse architecture that enabled the client to grow data volumes to four terabytes within five years without any performance impact.
Expedien proposed and implemented a strategy which included implementation of Data warehousing and ETL Best Practices, performance tuning of existing SAP and ETL jobs for quick wins. Expedien also proposed & implemented a multi tier data warehousing archiitecture to make data warehouse optimized and scalable for future needs and to avoid any performance imapct on source transactional systems.

Benefits:

The efforts resulted into reducing the daily extract time from 16 hours to 5 hours a day, that helped client finishing all data warehousing ETL processes to finish in night in a batch window. Reporting query time in majority of reports was reduced from hours to minutes.
Data in data warehouse was current and data warehousing reporting system became significantly faster and acceptable to user community. Executives were able to get timelier access to more complete business data from operations worldwide.
Impact on OLTP system by data warehousing processes during business hours was also reduced to zero. Data warehouse redesign efforts lead to a scalable system ready to incorporate current and upcoming future needs seamlessly.
It allowed the client to utilize a new dynamic system that would provide customized reporting, not only for its personnel across the globe but also for its customers.