Business Context
The customer initially used an excel-based manual reporting system inclusive in their on-premise EBS system. They realized the need for a cloud transformation to promote efficient and detailed reporting in the organization. To achieve this, we implemented:
Oracle ADW (Autonomous Data Warehouse) for a centralized data warehouse
OAC (Oracle Analytics Cloud) for centralized reporting
This project was finished in multiple phases over a course of 10 months.
The Client
Founded in 2006, the Saudi Railway Company (SAR) is the largest state-owned railway operator in the Middle East, providing public transportation services for goods and passengers. It was founded with the aim to construct, operate and manage passenger and freight rail networks that would link KSA’s northern region with both eastern and central regions. SAR provides an integrated transport solution for its passengers and transporting minerals, petroleum, and other petrochemical products across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The organization staffs over 2000 employees and has an annual revenue of about USD 139.32 million.
The Challenges
- Absence of centralized reporting platform was the biggest challenge of SAR. The employees used an excel sheet-based ad-hoc reporting procedure to extract important data from the external source system, which was time-consuming and often lacked the level of detail needed to carry out business tasks.
- There were no existing summary reports and defined KPI (Key Performance Indicators) that could help the client continuously identify risks, effectively optimize them, and take risk preventive actions to minimize impact.
- SAR had raised report reconciliation issues on financial and procurement reports. Additionally, the unstructured hierarchy in reporting had a major impact on various in-house reports.
- The nonexistence of Intra Period Financial Information before the closing of books was also an important concern.
- Lastly, the customer had no comprehensive visibility into overall transactions, which would help them improve business processes and operations.
The Solution
- The Mastek team developed multiple executive dashboards entailing major KPIs for several department heads, including procurement, finance, and HR.
- We ensured that all the transaction-level drill-down reports reached to the last level with all the necessary transactional details.
- Our implementation team identified the decisive values of the detailed application modules as well as the cross-module reports.
- Implemented the complex Oracle EBS Financial Statement Generator Dynamic Reports (Exclusive of Account Mapping File) to enable SAR to record business logic, and process accounting hierarchy updates with the reporting solution. This would eliminate user intervention as well as offer a dynamic reporting experience to their employees.
- We developed Oracle Analytics Cloud reports and dashboards and added them to a standardized repository, so they can be easily deployed as pre-built analytics in the future.
The Outcome
- The customer now has access to 80+ reports on Oracle Analytics Cloud on a single click.
- By automating the entire reporting solution, SAR has fully eliminated the manual efforts put in by its employees.
- We implemented a robust, centralized data warehouse, which can also be expanded to future data sources.
- For ad-hoc reporting, we implemented Self-Service Analytics for the business users.
- Implemented payroll and other similar cross-module reports standardized and improved their overall reporting processes.
- Using pre-built ETL solutions helped SAR enhance its system’s performance and scalability.
