Business Objective and Challenges

Business Objectives

A leading utilities company in UK with a large Oracle footprint and over 600 users needed to re-architect its data warehouse solution for the Capital Delivery, and HR data marts. As part of the initial go live, they wanted to implement their CD data mart for Ofgem/RIIO reporting.

Under RIIO, National Grid faces significant capital efficiency improvement challenges in order to outperform the unit cost allowances set for network development investments.  Capital Delivery needs to contribute directly to these efficiency improvements by delivering projects to scope, on time and more efficiently than ever before.  In addition, Ofgem’s new and much more onerous regulatory data quality standards mean an unprecedented level of data accuracy needs to be achieved in the annual reporting of construction project costs.

At present, Capital Delivery has limited project management reporting tools to achieve these outcomes.  National Grid’s Project Capital Delivery faces following challenge(s)

1. The most problematic gap is limited capability around of Earned Value Management (EVM); which is typically deployed on high value, long duration construction projects or major capital works programmes and without EVM, it is very difficult to ascertain whether expenditure over time, in partially complete major works is efficient and economic or not.By the time works are completed, it is too late to address poor performance.

Hence EVM is both a ‘reasonable, proportionate and necessary’ tool in providing proper oversight and control of project expenditures, especially when these expenditure levels reach in excess of £2bn pa.

2. Capital Delivery current reporting solution is based on COBRA reports which is manual and it takes a lot of resources to compile monthly reports.
3. Reports preparation is a manual process which is prone to error.
4. Current reporting solution doesn’t provide data trending, forecasting and/or data drilling.

Challenges

The client wanted to have the following as part of the project

• To maintain historical data.
• To setup a migration process for Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
• To schedule ODI jobs using an external scheduler

Reporting Process

The below diagram shows the complete data flow process

Figure  – Diagram of Data Flow for BIP and DataMart/OBIEE

The data for the above business processes would be:

• Planning & Scheduling
• Cost
  • Planned Value
  • Earned Values
  • Actual Cost
  • Upper Sanction Value
  • Current Baseline Budget (CBB)
  • Original Baseline Budget(OBB)
  • Monthly Spread Cost

All Cost related data would be supplied by COBRA system as flat files which would be initially loaded manually into staging area through PL/SQL ETL.

Project level information will be provided by Capital Delivery’s Reporting Team.

Planning & Scheduling related data would be extracted directly from P6 DB using PL/SQL procedure.