OIL & GAS

Sandia's Deployment of Oracle Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management Products Improves Data Access and Accuracy -- In an effort to streamline its reporting initiatives and improve data access and accuracy across its organization, Sandia National Laboratories has implemented a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) solution using Oracle's breadth of BI and corporate performance management (CPM) products. Sandia consolidated and standardized its reporting after determining its previous systems did not enable more timely reporting and were constantly overwhelmed by the time-consuming process of manually developing new reports. It developed a complete, automated and integrated performance and reporting system based on Oracle products to enhance decision-making abilities. Sandia implemented Oracle Daily Business Intelligence, Oracle Discoverer, and Oracle Portal, in conjunction with a custom data warehouse and Oracle E-Business Suite, to support many of its measurement and reporting initiatives. "Metrics are an important part of how well we all do in business," said Corey Reitz, Programmer/Analyst, Sandia. "They help us track progress, set goals and motivate change. This project has enabled Sandia to improve communications, gain performance in key areas and provide Sandia's customers with the benefits of an integrated Oracle solution." Sandia Improves Business Insight and Strategic Alignment with Oracle Sandia's deployment of its portal has delivered significant business benefits including: -- Increased worker efficiency by approximately 10 percent by offering a portal with the necessary BI tools embedded to help them find relevant information; -- Improved reporting capabilities by relying on enterprise-class tools to develop timely and accurate reports that access a secure repository versus relying on unsecured spreadsheets using stale data; and, -- Reduced in-house development efforts by approximately 20 percent by using pre-built reports and metrics offered by Oracle Daily Business Intelligence rather than conducting extensive custom development. In March 2004, Sandia began building a central repository to support the reporting needs of its constituents including facilities, finance, human resources, information technology (IT), logistics, manufacturing, and procurement. Over the course of eight months, Sandia developed a portal and leveraged its existing Oracle-based data warehouse, which incorporated data from multiple applications and other external sources. Sandia's new reporting system incorporates: -- Oracle Daily Business Intelligence -- the embedded, management reporting system of the Oracle E-Business Suite, which provides Sandia managers with access to timely, relevant and accurate reports for Sandia's Oracle applications, including Oracle Payables, Oracle Procurement, Oracle Project Accounting, Oracle Service, and Oracle Supply Chain Management; -- Oracle Discoverer -- an ad hoc query, reporting and analysis tool with dashboard features that allows Sandia employees to build reports on the fly and developers to produce re-usable reports; and, -- Oracle Portal -- a complete and integrated framework that provides Sandia with a secure and scalable single entry point to its reporting and measurement pages and tools. "Sandia deals with massive amounts of data, but unless that data is turned into information, it is worth little," said Bill Klein, Analyst, Sandia. "Our BI strategy was to transform our data into information that can be leveraged in a timely manner. We have accomplished that and more."