Forging Operational Optimization for Leading Manufacturer
overview
The customer was faced with multiple challenges both from a business process and IT infrastructure perspective. The lack of a mature reporting system, known issues with source data consistency, and a lack of appetite for long term IT projects drove its desire to rethink their analytics ecosystem.
Download the brief case study here.
challenges
The current state when PREDICTif arrived on-site was as follows:
- Limited information for regular business operations impacting revenue and profits
- Lack of detailed reports on the operations of its autonomously managed business units
- No data governance existed at the corporate level to mitigate duplication and enforce business logic
- Reports were on manually linked spreadsheets, including custom business logic with undocumented business rules hidden in excel macros
- Multiple POFs (Point of Failure) stemming from a singularly managed, excel-based report set with limited control over data source format
- Need for immediate ROI to justify a more expansive data project
- Reliant upon manual email processes to deliver up-to-date reports
- Time consuming manual processes to answer business questions
- Data issues hidden by years of manual processes
technology used
Oracle Cloud
Tableau
Oracle Data Integrator
Workflows
Oracle Database
Secured FTP
solution
With minimal disruption to ONI’s existing processes and its staff, PREDICTif recommended a phased approach to minimize the impact of change in an effort that upgrades its technology as well as simplify its reporting process. The PREDICTif team completed all three phases of the project.
- Implemented an easy-to-consume dashboard on a highly scalable and configurable platform that delivers up-to-date critical financial, operational, and forecasting information to the management team daily.
- Designed a pluggable data acquisition, data staging, and data mart architecture utilizing Oracle’s Database as a Service (DBaaS), which dramatically decreased deployment time.
- The use of the pluggable data acquisition modules ensured that the incoming data streams were normalized across the various business unites supplying information.
- Oracle Data Integrator was deployed in the Cloud to manage all data movement and management.
- Deployed Tableau for the data visualization in the Oracle Cloud, eliminating the data latency issue.
- The cloud decision enabled ONI to avoid onboarding any new technical staff – the entire solution was turned over to a selected few of power users.
Automated the processing of data files from business units to corporate, improving accuracy
Delivered a standard fiscal calendar, extendable to all the reporting affiliates, providing up-to-date information
Reduced Support Resources enabling business and IT to focus more on analytics and insights, less on data engineering
Enhanced Robustness on a most updated hardware and software infrastructure, empowering future upgrades and expansion