DIMENSIONAL DATA MODELING COMES OF AGE
ComputerWorld has reported that Houston-based Pride International Inc., a $1 billion on- and offshore drilling contractor, has been employing a multidimensional database system since January to track the financial performance of its entities as well as the productivity of its drilling equipment. Pride began utilizing the system because it had no easy way to gather and analyze information from the 15 companies it has acquired during the past four years, Pride CIO Yvonne Donohoe told ComputerWorld.
"When you try to combine [systems and procedures] across companies and you don't have time to assimilate them into one standard [data format], you end up with five or six streams of data coming in that [look] different" from one another, Donohoe said.
Apparently Pride is far from unique in its use of this technology. A growing number of companies are using dimensional data modeling to compare business performance indicators, such as profits and return on equity, to a region, channel or product, said Henry Morris, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.- based International Data Corp., a sister company to Computerworld.
To provide its executives with a consistent view of operational costs and revenue across regions, Pride installed Information Builders Inc.'s WorldMart, an analytical data mart. Pride chose WorldMart because it was one of the few data warehouses that interfaced with the Denver-based J. D. Edwards World Solutions Co.'s OneWorld enterprise resource planning system, which Pride is installing.
Donohoe said she expects 90% of the OneWorld system to be rolled out by year's end, with inventory and a handful of other functions added to Pride's offices in Venezuela and Argentina in next year's first quarter. Prior to installing WorldMart on its Hewlett-Packard Co. servers running Windows NT, it often took two weeks or more for Pride executives to obtain a report that would compare, say, the return on equity from equipment used in Colombia and Indonesia.
By providing its executives with immediate access to that information for faster decision-making, Pride expects its $300,000 data warehousing investment to pay for itself after its first full year of operation, Donohoe told ComputerWorld.
"The key statistics we need from a drilling rig is uptime," she said. When a rig goes down, "it's major money."
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