Client: Solar Turbines, Inc.

COMPANYPROFILE: Solar Turbines, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar, Inc., designs and manufactures industrial gas turbines for on- and off-shore electrical power generation, for marine propulsion and for producing, processing and transporting natural gas and oil.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Report migration due to legacy data warehouse retirement ENVIRONMENT: BaaN Data Warehouse, Oracle, Informatica, Cognos

SUMMARY: Solar Turbines was up against an immoveable deadline to retire their legacy BaaN data warehouse and migrate the existing Cognos reports to their newer Oracle data warehouse. However, the challenge was not to forklift the nearly 15,000 reports, but to reduce that number down to what was actually needed and currently used by the business. A combination of usage reports and power user interviews brought the number down to approximately 2,000 active reports. The work was approached in two phases: analysis and execution. A detailed exercise of decomposing the reports down to their root elements was conducted, and a matrix of all the base elements was produced. The elements were further rationalized to their location in the data warehouse. This exercise identified similar reports and metrics, and created an opportunity to consolidate these objects to further reduce the number of reports to migrate. A set of baseline reports were captured in the old system and referenced during the execution phase. As the reports were recreated in the new environment, they were validated against the legacy reports for accuracy. The result was a huge reduction in the number of reports throughout the environment, the migration of only actively used reports, and the retirement of the legacy data warehouse within the allotted time.