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Prime Ministers Department, Malaysia

The Office of the Prime Minister, PMO in short, under the authority of the Prime Minister's Department, is entrusted with assisting the Prime Minister in implementing the following mission and objectives.

It is entrusted to secure an efficient environment for the Prime Minister to perform his duties and responsibilities effectively by providing speedy services and organize tasks and responsibilities of the honorable Prime Minister.

In mid 2007, with the increase of various report analysis requirement, Speedminer DW & BPM (Speedminer) was purchased. Speedminer was chosen, beyond other local and international brands because of its speed, strong analytical capabilities and cube-less architecture. Speedminer stood out amongst the rest of the BI tools because it can build and regenerate dimensions without the need of cubes.

The whole process of data warehousing (inclusive of end-user training) was completed within a 4-month period. The user-friendliness and zero-footprint enables user, and management to access information. Speedminer DW & BPM was used in three different departments namely the Human Resource Department, Accounts and Administration. The databases in these departments are a combination of Lotus Notes, PostgreSQL and text files.

Data from all these databases were loaded into two different servers namely the DEVELOPMENT and LIVE (Production) server via the ETL server using ECP (Enterprise Caché Protocol) database mapping. The ETL server's main function was to load data from the source database. This way, the CPU process is reduced in the DEVELOPMENT and LIVE servers. The development server was to ensure that the analyses/reports built were in working conditions before being moved into the LIVE server. This server is otherwise called the test site. The LIVE server is a place where all analyses/reports workflow system is used by PMO authorized users for the purpose of generating reports. Once each User Requirement Study is accepted by the data warehouse committee, and top management, the data is moved into the LIVE system. From here the analysis is considered fit for use and is updated with current data.

Upon completion of loading current data into the LIVE server, Speed Scheduler is set to absorb current data from the source database into the two servers. Data is uploaded in near real time to enable end users and management to see analyses of most current trend. From here, management will be able to take the next course of action by delegating the task through Speed Office or Web-mail to the next person.

For the Human Resources Department, a total of 12 types of analytic reports were created. They ranged from reports that analyzed staff positions, retirement age, increments, staff movements within the organization etc.

As for the Administration department, a total of 6 reports were created. The administration department requested reports to monitor staff attendance, incoming time trend, monthly assembly attendance trend analysis, analysis of the office vehicle usage, meeting room usage and statistics of educational excursions to Prime Minister's Office.

As for the Finance Department, some of the reports included planning annual expenditure controls, budget workflow forecast, overseas trips expenditure and others. There were a total of 5 reports created for the Finance Department.

With these reports, the top management is able to gauge historical trends of staff performance, human resource issues and have specified detail information of budget expenditure for specific departments.

Staff is also able to create and view charts/graphs or pivot tables in a jiffy because Speedminer is capable of generating split second adhoc queries. Therefore, predefined reports in specified templates can be prepared instantly and sent via softcopy, hardcopy and even shared amongst staff with specific authority.

The IT department staff in the Prime Minister's Office find the usage of these reports quite beneficial and less time consuming. Furthermore, within 3 days of software training, the end users are able to build their own reports from scratch without the assistance from the Speedminer technical team. This has enhanced PMO's faith in Speedminer DW & BPM as well as encouraged other departments within the Prime Minister's Office to conduct Speedminer proof of concept.

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