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The Office of the
Prime Minister, PMO in short, under the authority of the
Prime Minister's Department, 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 and analyses requirement, PMO initiated a Business
Intelligence tender. During the one day technical evaluation
for each vendor, Speedminer managed to demonstrate all the
cases put forth in within less than 2 hours, during the
remaining time, all ad-hoc additional questions asked was
also answered to the judges' satisfaction and thus scored
extra bonus points. Other BI software vendors were stuck
at some point in the test cases and therefore not able to
complete the test even with additional time allocated. Finally,
Speedminer was chosen based on merit.
The whole implementation process of data
warehousing and business intelligence (inclusive of end-user
training) was completed within a 4-month period. The key
reason for such speedy implementation was due to the CUBE-LESS
architecture of Speedminer, where additional dimensions
can be added or modification of data relationship can be
done easily, as oppose to other CUBE-base solutions which
often require redesign of the data model and thus make the
meta-data change to incur major work. Speedminer is easier
to implement and simpler to maintain.
Speedminer was implemented and used in
three different departments namely the Human Resource Department,
Accounts and Administration. The data sources for the data
warehouse are a combination of SQL Server, Lotus Notes,
PostgreSQL, text files and OCR scanning documents. The user-friendliness
and zero-footprint client deployment enables user, and management
to access information from anywhere, anytime by using a
simple internet browser.
Separate servers were used as ETL servers
and parallel ETL process are implemented to ensure high
performance to load from disparate data sources. Through
the advance ECP (Enterprise Cache Protocol) feature, the
DEVELOPMENT and PRODUCTION server are able to shared many
common data and meta data, leaving only Analysis, Reports,
Subject Areas and necessary components stored separately
between the two environments, this greatly save the storage
space, and making the migration from Development to Production
much simpler.
Speedminer also managed to link tables
with Many-to-Many relationship. The problem was encountered
with the need to link the attendance, leave (holiday/off
site) tables to the staff information table. The attendance
was in PostgreSQL database, and leave/staff data was in
the Lotus Notes database. The primary keys of the tables
do not match directly and require processing and computation.
However with Speedminer, all these challenges were resolved
one by one very quickly and allow the project to complete
within the timeline planned. For the Administration department,
analyses developed including monitoring 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.
The Human Resources department on the
other hand requires extraction of data from printed documents.
We delivered a simple scanner to scan the document to text
(OCR), and with the intelligence within Speedminer ETL module,
the formatting of the text into proper column as well as
eliminating extra characters and adjusting the information
was done automatically, the need of user correction of the
data is therefore reduced to minimum. A total of 12 types
of analytic reports were created for the Human Resources
Department. They ranged from reports that analyzed staff
positions, retirement age, increments, staff movements within
the organization etc.
As for the Finance Department, the analyses
developed including planning annual expenditure controls,
budget workflow forecast, overseas trips expenditure and
others. 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.
With just 3 days of training, PMO
staffs were able to build their own analyses and reports,
the system has helped the IT department to offload some
of the need to create and prepare reports for the end users.
With the confidence on the product, Speedminer was also
introduced to Implementation Coordination Unit of Prime
Minister Department, which then became another reputable
customer of Speedminer.
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