Britannia Operators Limited

System Dynamics implements a Business Objects XIR2 with Web Intelligence

Britannia Operators Limited (BOL) partnership between Conoco Phillips and Chevron Texaco. BOL’s role is to manage and operate the natural gas platform Britannia, situated 210km north-east of Aberdeen (Scotland). 

The Challenge
BOL use a legacy maintenance application named Maintenance Controller.  This application is core in enabling BOL operate to the highest safety and availability standards possible, however the legacy application did not meet all of BOL’s reporting requirements.

In December 2006 BOL commissioned System Dynamics to undertake an assignment to assess the Business Intelligence requirements of the maintenance business function. The outcome of that assignment was a project plan and functional and technical specifications, which BOL then commissioned System Dynamics to build.

The Approach
 

• Business Analysis and scoping of the client requirements.
• Design and Build a Data Warehouse including ETL development.
• Implementation of a Business Intelligence solution incorporating security model.
• Report Writing, Business and IT Training.

The Solution – Business Objects XIR2 with Web Intelligence
The Maintenance Controller (MC) Oracle Enterprise schema is the main source for data.  The ETL process incrementally extracts data from the MC schema, transforms and cleanses data and finally loads it into the MC Data Mart. For best performance and highest flexibility the process is hand coded and heavily uses Oracle data warehouse functionality such as pipelined table functions, set operators etc. The ETL process is kicked off on a nightly basis via an Oracle job.

The Business Objects Universe is the semantic layer that maps onto the data mart and hides the complexity of the underlying data structure from the end user. It is also used to make dimension attributes and measure fields available to end users and to set up permissions on fields and underlying data. Business Objects Web Intelligence is the web based reporting solution.

The Benefits
The nature of the Britannia operation means that plant maintenance is crucial both to health and safety and to ensuring the profitable operation of the platform at all times.

• Role playing with the time dimension allows users huge flexibility in asking business questions of the data. 
• A highly flexible architecture allows additional dimensions to be easily plugged into the solution as required by the business. 
• The high availability and high performance of the solution means that reports over maintenance and asset data is instantly available, helping to ensure maintenance operations continue to operate at and adhere to the highest possible safety standards.