Blue Dart: warehousing success
The Client
Blue Dart Express Ltd and DHL
Blue Dart Express Ltd is India’s most successful air express carrier and premium logistics-services provider. Simply put, they have the most extensive domestic network., covering over 13,700 locations, servicing more than 220 countries and territories worldwide through their sales alliance with DHL, the premier global brand name in express distribution services.
Project Deployment Summary:
Web-based data warehousing
Blue Dart has implemented an end-to-end business user and customer-centric data warehousing solution. The data warehouse is integrated with a web-based information delivery platform, to reach out to their employees and management. Soon, they seek to reach out to their agents and customers as well.
The information presented to the business managers is highly secure. Every business user can see his information below his hierarchy but not vice versa.
Historical & daily information as well as information cut off upto a certain time is presented, so that the business users can take efficient & effective decisions at the appropriate time. This helps the management to identify “lost/falling of customers” in terms of revenue, and also the reason for falling/loosing the customers.
Business users can perform online analysis across any of their business dimensions. For instance, time, branches, cities, products, market segments and customers. Also, to analyze the trends, users can see Year Over Year, Quarter Over Quarter and Month Over Month measures like Revenue profits, Shipments, Total Weight, Yield percentages etc.
Analysts can also perform trend analysis online, across any of the businesses dimensions, analyzing top-performing products, customers, segments, customers within segments, products within segments, single segment or product performances, customer/product/revenue attrition, acquisition, and so on.
Top management across the country will also be provided with dashboards, with all the key business indicators visible at a glance.
The web-based data warehousing solution will also cater to executives looking at daily sales, finance, and shipment delivery operations in the future.
The Challenges
- Reading historical/live data from FoxPro and other Transactional Databases, and consolidating it in a centralized Oracle-based warehouse, for ultimate delivery to users over a simple web browser.
- Seamless Integration with their external applications for authentication.
- Personalized views for different management hierarchies, with all possible business dimensions in a single view.
Business Benefits, Technical Differentiators
Easy migration of historical/live business data required for reporting and analysis, from FoxPro to Oracle, and finally in a web browser for ease of use by employees and management.
Most of the information required for the business users is cached and hence, there is negligible hit to the Database during working hours.
Business users can view their financial information and sales trends in a point ‘n’ click environment. They can create their own business scenarios, without the interference of skilled I.T. programmers, and take quick business decisions.
Business users can create and save multiple business views from a single template, without running queries and hitting the database
The tool used to show the information is a 3 dimensional view. Business users could change the view according to their requirement by simply dragging required business dimensions and need not depend on the IT department to deliver the information. Which makes the business users to be independent.