Information is everywhere, and it can be a daunting task to create tangible results from disconnected and seemingly endless streams of data. Analyzing and understanding your organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) can make the difference between success and failure. Avum knows the intrinsic value of accurate Business Intelligence (BI), providing company leadership with informative data visualization tools to help guide their decision making process, mediating potential weaknesses or nurturing prospective strengths.
Avum designed, developed, and deployed a comprehensive BI solution for the Commander, Navy Installations Command (CNIC), Fleet and Family Readiness (F&FR), improving their capabilities to oversee and manage the Navy’s global golf program. Utilizing the SAP suite of Business Intelligence tools, Avum crafted a custom solution that involved three main stages; data capture, data storage/transformation, and data visualization.
The Point of Sale (POS) systems across the entire golf program were heterogeneous, so CNIC F&FR needed a universal application that could capture the same metrics uniformly from every course. KPIs were identified based off the current POS systems and input from the golf program managers. Avum then built a JEE 5 web application that the course staff use to record the day’s performance (i.e. rounds played, military rank of the player, equipment rented, weather conditions, etc). The web application was designed to be intuitive and straightforward to reduce the frequency of data entry errors and promote accurate data sets for analytics later in the process. To ensure accuracy and encourage diligent data entry, Avum built into the web application the ability for managers to generate data entry reports and fix any clerical errors. Also built into the web application is an automated email alert system that informs managers when no course data has been entered over a period of time. Avum tested and deployed the web application in CNIC F&FR’s NetWeaver Application Server. We set up an OLTP SQL database to store the web application data and used DBconnect to establish the link into the SAP Business Warehouse (BW).
The SAP BW is the backbone of the overall architecture, enabling quantitative performance data from the web application to be combined with finical data from the client’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Regularly scheduled process chains are in place to move the data from its source system to the InfoCubes for storage and consolidation. Before the data can be stored it must be transformed and cleansed so it is useful at the presentation level. The first objects in the SAP BW are the Persistent Staging Areas (PSAs), temporarily storing unchanged data from the DataSource (SQL database, ERP database, flat file, etc.) in transparent relational database tables, allowing the tables to be transformed and stored in the following steps without having to constantly communicate with source systems. Process chains extract the data tables from the PSAs; the tables are joined and transformed, and then loaded in their respective DataStore Object (DSO). Data is again extracted, transformed, and loaded into the consolidated DSOs, where it is ready for the final extraction and transformation before being loaded into one of the four multidimensional InfoCubes. A MultiProvider was developed to combine data from the InfoCubes and feed it to the SAP Business Explorer (BEx) Queries that support the dashboard.
The BEx queries were developed, along with customer exit variables, to provide the dashboard with the requested analytics and drill down capabilities. The dashboard was designed and developed using SAP Design Studio and deployed into CNIC F&FR’s NetWeaver Application Server. Design Studio provided many useful charting and navigational components, but in order to meet the client’s specific requirements, Avum decided to develop a set of custom components, allowing us to create very complex and interactive data visualization elements within the dashboard. The dashboard now provides its users with an up-to-date visual representation of the entire golf program and its performance. The user can view the performance at an individual course level, a regional level, a geographic level, or a global level and compare those values to the Naval average. The user can also view information spanning from daily to yearly values, enabling them to identify past trends and make informed discussions for the future of their program.
The solution that Avum provided CNIC F&FR is adaptable to almost any organization, providing management with the tools and resources to make critical decisions off real and relevant performance data that is straightforward and easy to understand.