Background

Britannia Operator Limited (BOL) is a 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. 

BOL utilised Mantenance Controller (MC) for maintenance management. It was an old system that provided insufficient management information.

BOL commissioned System Dynamics to undertake a business analysis to assess the BI 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.

During the subsequent build phase a Data Warehouse including ETL development was designed and built. System Dynamics also implemented a BI solution incorporating security model. Report writing and business and IT training were also carried out.  

Solution

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 ultimately 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 started 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. 

Benefits

The nature of Britannia Operator's business means that plant maintenance is crucial both to health and safety and to ensuring the profitable operation of the platform at all times. The solution provided the following benefits to BOL:

• 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.