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Business Intelligence Solution For Oil Company
Challenge
The CEO of our client company had a custom ERP that addressed the operational needs of every department in his group of companies across five countries worldwide. However, his update on the health of each department would come in the form of long and bulky reports that took ages to download over the dialup connection that he had when he was traveling. He knew exactly what information he was looking for. He just did not know how to find it quickly, in one place.
Solution
Calsoft proposed a business intelligence solution that put real-time relevant information in the CEO’s Palm so that wherever he goes, he can now get his information delivered to him.
Calsoft first interviewed the CEO and found out exactly what information he needed. Calsoft then talked to the MIS department to understand the current ERP database and figure out how the information could be obtained. Like all business intelligence information, it required a complicated extraction process.
Calsoft wrote a set of utilities to extract the data from the ERP, in the format required by the CEO. Some of the information that Calsoft needed was not available in the ERP – Calsoft therefore designed data entry screens to input the information. Calsoft also gave the MIS access to the data in our tables so that they could utilize it and create departmental reports.
Calsoft then created a web site that was optimized for viewing on the Palm, with different tabs for each type of information the CEO needed, for example, Sales, Inventory, Risk Position, Stock prices, Collections, Profitability, etc. Whenever the CEO enters a tab, an ORACLE routine is fired at the database. This routine connects to the ERP and gets the information based on the latest data in the ERP. This information is then presented to the CEO for viewing on his Palm.
The business intelligence information that our system derives is extremely confidential and needs to be totally secured. In order to ensure this, we implemented an RSA SecurID solution based on passcodes that change every minute and are displayed on a key fob carried by the CEO on his key chain.
The CEO connects to the Internet using his GSM global phone. Wherever he travels, he now has business intelligence in the Palm of his hand.
Technology
Our business intelligence system had a three-tier architecture. We used style sheets, HTML, DHTML and Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) for the presentation layer, Visual Basic components for the business logic layer, and ORACLE 8.1.5 for the database layer. Security was implemented using RSA Security’s SecurID solution.