How Network Rail benefited from Oracle Business Analytics through the Model Office

Requirement

 

Over the years Network Rail has made a big investment in Oracle Technology; E-business Suite, Oracle Projects, Primavera and Oracle Business Analytics are all examples.  There are also many systems to support the use of these Oracle applications including tailored engineering systems, email servers, documents management, share-point and many others.

As with many large companies and organisations; processes, procedures and challenges are often complex due to:

-       Overlapping organisations and initiatives

-       IT change control and security

-       Access to systems and data

-       Too much red tape and stakeholder management

Prōject were engaged with an initial objective to investigate how to:

-       Remove and obsolete the proliferation of point-to-point reporting solutions

-       Remove the associated (large) costs for support and maintenance of these solutions which are inflexible, only answer a specific question, have overlapping, non compatible different data sources.

-       Provide a proof of concept solution to support optimization planning of engineering project activities across their infrastructure

Solution

Prōject created a hosted Model Office consisting of the follwing componenets:

-       Oracle Projects

-       Primavera P6

-       E-Business Suite

-       Oracle Business Intelligence (including Project Analytics)

-       Oracle Endeca, including Endeca Extensions for Projects

The Model Office approach enables the demonstration of new software and features uninhibited by customisations and extensions.  It can also be loaded with real sample data and configuration aligned to the business data.  This provides a real vision of future solutions based on the subset of sample data that reflects real business transactions, situations and problems. 

Development timescales are significantly reduced to develop packaged software components that can be implemented back into the production systems.

Network Rail now uses the Model Offcie as the starting point for system Proof of Concepts and to build up the detail required for their Business Cases.