Cargo Transportation Data Warehouse
Customer
Belarusian Railway, an organization of more than 200 legal entities located in different regions of the Republic of Belarus.
Industry
Railway
Project Overview
The Cargo Transportation Data Warehouse (CTDW) Subsystem is a part of the Information Analysis System to Support Management Decisions in Cargo Transportation (IAS SMD CT) at Belarusian Railway (BR). IAS SMD CT is designed to manage technological processes at BR. CTDW is intended to provide BR with data needed for performance analysis. It enables the analyst to monitor existing key performance indicators (KPI) related to different time periods, setting detail levels based on his or her criteria. CTDW is built on the BusinessObjects information analysis platform.
CTDW consists of a set of specific data marts that aggregate information about certain areas of activity. To support ETL processes and further data processing, spreadsheets are replicated in CTDW from the reference data subsystem. Technological spreadsheets are generated for the same processes with information specific for this subsystem.
The BusinessObjects metadata base stores marts and information about user access rights. CTDW contains several dozens of previously aggregated and detailed information marts. The analytical data marts provide information for the last three years and are filled once a day at night. The average size of a spreadsheet is from 1.5 to 3 million records, depending on the tracking object (train, goods van, container or locomotive). The detailed data are stored in the subsystem of cargo transportation history and the bulkiest spreadsheets contain hundreds of millions of records.
Developed in C/C++, the system is intended for everyday automatic run in the legacy operating system IBM OS/390 under the management of IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler. Data from the reference data subsystem are transferred to the data warehouse spreadsheets using IBM DB2 DataPropagator. The software provides user access both through desktop products and web interface using WebIntelligence products of SAP BusinessObjects.
Project Execution
The design of the data warehouse and the development of analytical applications were carried out in phases, beginning with the design pilot phase in accordance with the Datawing methodology. The pilot phase resulted in the decision to purchase the startup package of BusinessObjects. Afterwards, the increasing number of users showed the need for at least 50 additional licenses, which were purchased. Currently, the system is being maintained and further expanded.
The following work was executed:
- Data warehouse was built using industrial tools
- Industrial tools were applied to transfer data from the operating system to the data warehouse
- IBA Group made two supplies of BusinessObjects and is currently providing technical support
- IBA Group assists BR in the formation of a skilled team of professionals to maintain the data warehouse and analytical applications.
IBA had to overcome a number of challenges:
- Data from the legacy systems were unavailable and only a few BR specialists knew them
- The data arrays were huge in size
- The future users were unable to formalize their IT needs
- The system had a complicated architecture
- IBA Group had to make the system operative even at the early stages of its development.
All these problems were resolved, primarily thorough close cooperation between the customer and IBA Group and a careful selection of industrial software and hardware platforms. When designing the data warehouse, IBA strictly followed the Datawing Data Warehouse Engineering methodology.
Project Results
Belarusian Railway has been using BusinessObjects for several years as an analytical reporting tool for cargo transportation. Several hundreds of users are registered within the BR BusinessObjects System. Of these, ten users are administrators and designers and 10–15 users have installed desktop products. The rest use the system via web interface. Currently, the system is being expanded.
