GXCalypso and its DW.

Shipping agencies sell their shipping services, mainly freights, and other accessory services that derivate from goods' transport.   The transport of goods requires certain paperwork to document the contents and travel schedule of the goods being shipped. Records such as these are not only used for the shipper and receiver, but also to manage the business of transporting. Among the required information is a document called the Indicator Rolling Forecast System (IRFC). This is a very pertinent piece as it affects the agent's earning and can be quite complex. It establishes the load and target's projection per region and each agency gives it to the assembler for him to prepare his annual budget. The IRFC is presented once a year, it is updated every three months and according to the accuracy of the projection that the agency performed, the assembler offers him an incentive. 
'The assembler Ned Lloyd programs the ships, and all the container’s positions according to what one thinks is going to load and where (five containers to Rotterdam, for example) and offers incentives for delays or for coinciding with the projected budget. It is yet another payment tool that the assembler gives his agent, that plays an integral role in the business and must be accurate', explains Dodero's commercial manager, Miguel Bernardini. 
Dodero has been working with a data warehouse, developed by Kernel Consultores de Uruguay, for the past eight months. It allowed him to reduce the elaboration of IRFC, which used to consume between 15 to 20 days of preparation, all the way down to one day. 'The tool has simplified this work. It is vital information that cannot have errors because the assembler pays us in a tabulated way and via incentives. These incentives are given per region, if he loaded more of this or that, than that information is vital because it means money', Bernardini outlines.
The documents that travel on the ship and that have to fulfill certain requirements regarding quality and quantity of information, are managed by the Calypso system, a specific system for shipping agencies, developed in Visual Basic against Access four years ago by Kernel Consultores. When the client's demands rose (Dodero's) 'we had to face continuing developing specific reports in VB, with the well-known development and maintenance cost, or doing a 'cut' and start generating a knowledge base'. Kernel chose the latter and developed the Calypso application in GeneXus to assemble the DW.
'There was an initial development cost, which was the generation of the necessary knowledge base for calculating measurement structures, data views for accessing the information in the old base and generating the loading programs 100% with GeneXus. This cost is more important than the Measure Table' design, as in our case the relation was at minimum 5 to 1', Bon explained.
Regarding the DW development, 'the Metadata generation was not very difficult. I figure that the Metadata's generation is at least 90% automatic and a 10% is free for personalization of specifics'. n Detecting the business' measures went smoothly. In this DW we manage seven measures, of which two of them are the ones the user uses daily. The others came up as proposals during the development and contributed to improve the solutions regarding the perspectives of how to use the information', he added.
''When we went to develop a DW in the early discussions with the client, it was clearly stated that the aim was to minimize the project's maintenance, and we decided to include all the information that GXCalypso manages today. There is nothing static. GXCalypso can manage new information in the future that would be incorporated in the DW as demanded'. Regarding the development time, the first stage took about 150 hours and the second stage took less than 30 hours.  The remaining time of the total 200 hours were spent with adjustments, Bon informed.
In the Dodero agency there is one post for the general manager, another one for the commercial manager and three other strictly commercial ones that evacuate the clients and assemblers' queries, as well as the internal information requirements.  It did not take long to for the operators, who were used to Excel, to get used to dealing with GXplorer. 'We get what we need right away because we have assembled queries. We have to simply enter that query and search each time. If the assembler asks for other things, we assemble a new query', one of the operators, Fernando Caballero commented. 'We did it not only for fulfilling the obligation of informing the assembler, but also to track our clients: to know how much he bought from us in the most efficient manner, by pressing the least quantity of keys possible in order to try to sell him more without taking up his time', the commercial manager outlines. 'Now we can get a lot more information', he says. Prior to the DW, they got the client's information with a program that was very tabulated and statistical. It was a program that we used 10 years ago, when the questions were different, and much more simple. Here we ask for more things, more quickly. Now, to assist the client we need to have his past performance; and with this we can get it really quickly'. 
It helps us have more and improved information in a quicker more reliable fashion’, Dodero's commercial manager concluded. The product is installed in the COSCO (China Ocean Shipping Company) Uruguay branch which bought the finished package and installed two licenses: one of a managing character and the other one of a commercial managing character. 'It was installed the next day and we only had to consider two or three parameters for the load to stay generated in the operative system', Bon remembered