Case studies

How Arqiva benefited from replacing non-Oracle Business Intelligence products with Oracle BI Applications

Requirement

Arqiva consolidated multiple operational systems and two Business Intelligence platforms to reduce costs and achieve more effective use of information.

Arqiva, National Grid Wireless (NGW) and their predecessor organisations date back more than 80 years. Arqiva and NGW completed a merger in 2008, bringing together numerous IT systems. Whilst some operational systems were consolidated, three main reporting tools continued to co-exist; namely Business Objects and Cognos, in conjunction with Microsoft Excel.

The reporting infrastructure that supported the business was largely developed using a report-centric approach; focusing on the reporting requirements of individual operational systems. This approach often resulted in disconnected reporting silos, the key risk of which being “many versions of the truth”. A consolidated, entity-based view of the business and its processes were simply not achievable.

As a result, skills and the utilisation of resources were focused on data extraction and transformation, and not in analysis of the information required to drive improvement. The overall cost of ownership of Arqiva’s reporting solutions was significantly higher than deemed necessary, and risked continual growth with increasing business demand.

Solution

Arqiva selected an Oracle Business Intelligence solution as a natural successor to their existing reporting systems. The pre-packaged BI Applications have given Arqiva rapid reporting benefits across their E-Business Suite, and the OBIEE platform has provided Arqiva with the extensibility required to report across all of their core systems. The result: one data warehouse, one reporting platform, reduced development costs and one version of the truth.

Through interactive dashboards and reports, stakeholders at Arqiva now have immediate visibility of the company’s performance against their financial strategic goals. Project managers can effectively and securely control their projects; tracking spend, budget and forecasts across whole divisions. The BI Applications provide rapid visibility of trends and anomalies across vast data volumes, whilst also providing users with drill down capability to source transactions in the E-Business Suite.

Prōject’s unique combination of BI Applications and E-Business Suite expertise enabled rapid deployment, and maximised the benefits of the BI Applications. Tailored dashboards were built to requirement, and by fully utilising the BI Applications architecture, development costs and TCO were both reduced. Comprehensive user narrative and commentary functionality were built into the solution, along with fully integrated E-Business Suite security. Dashboards built using the BI Applications are being used throughout Arqiva, from executives and directors to project and cost centre managers.