The National Administration of Fuel, Alcohol and Portland (ANCAP) http://www.ancap.com.uy in Uruguay today has a monopoly in fuel sales, “But we may not be in this situation more than a short while, an exceptional information analysis for making decisions is mandatory. “Without that, we could disappear,”, the planning and development Chief of Commercialization, Sergio Figueroa, remarked.
Data Warehousing is the fundamental tool for business knowledge. “For the first time we have the tool that we wanted and need to do what is key for us to achieve our goals,” ANCAP's commercial manager, Daniel Porrini, said in a meeting where GXplorer and DW where presented to the general management. It takes daily information from the invoice database system that includes data from the last four years of the seven ANCAP's plants, which, represents more than 3000 clients purchasing more than 600 products processed and sold.
GXplorer "Allows testing the sales per month, per day, product, year, week, distribution plant, client, etc. which is fundamental for making decisions. Today we press a key and have the fuel sales up to yesterday. Before this, we used to get the information through a batch process that was performed on the central systems, which generated a delay of 15 to 20 days in order to get the data from the previous month. ”Obviously, we were always late to make decisions,” the commercial Diagnosis Chief, Juan José Aristoy, said. “And, what is worse, the former information was very limited because the queries were fixed: per product, month of the present year, accumulation of the present year, month and accumulation of the previous year. Today the user classifies the information the way he wants,” Figueroa added.
The users perform their variable queries with the GXplorer – from there they access the data universe by selecting what they need- then they review them on an Excel spreadsheet. “For example, today you can have the sales information of each of the service stations per location and notice that the sales of a station are falling, analyze why and take corrective actions. It could be possible that near a particular ANCAP station, another station was built, and it started getting selling to the people we used to sell, so we have to make decisions for dealing with that situation,” he explained. “It used to take up to 20 days to get the information from the previous month, and today we can have it the day after the month closes. Apart from offering the required information in time, the tool allows the general management sector to manage the sales statistics to devote 100% of their time to the data analysis. Until now, 70% of the man-hours of this task were dedicated to recollecting and entering data to the former system, and only 30% to analysis, because in order to access the analysis level they had to re-enter data in Excel to get different versions of the same reality. Now, we have it in five minutes and it frees us from doing the job of data processing,” Aristoy stated.
In addition to this, as the DW will be available for several users –with different access and security levels- they will be able to perform their queries directly and to save analysis time that this section dedicated to satisfying other users' queries. “Anyone who has normal knowledge of Excel will not have any trouble with using GXplorer, and we will ensemble pre-defined queries for the users that are not accustomed to using it. But in ANCAP, most of us have quite good knowledge of Excel,” Figueroa pointed out.
Another aspect that has the ANCAP's GXplorer users fascinated is the publication of reports that they have to present the general management month to month via Intranet. The bulletin's collaboration used to require assembling queries, photocopying, and distributing, much of which used to take two days of work. Today, the day after the month closes, you press the 'publicize' button and the users automatically access the report from their machines.
The commercializing area is the pioneer for ANCAP in the use of the tool, but the idea is to install it in the general management, and in the basic economy/finance and production areas.
“It is a tool that is going to change our lives. We all have the idea that the old process was just a sad reality for ANCAP. That was before the tool – we have a new reality now. It's incredible!” Figueroa concluded.
Technical Profile
GeneXus Consulting developed the operational database using AS/400 with the Cobol generator. The DW also uses the AS/400 as a database server while the metadata operates on a Windows NT server.
The loading processes are performed inside the operational database and they are executed everyday at the close of each distribution plant. Each plant's close implies invoicing, stock updating and then loading in the DW.
Team
GeneXus Consulting:
Project Director: Daniel Dávila and Marcela Fernández
Project Manager: Claudia Araujo
Analyst: Luciano Silveira
Support: Carla Demarchi
ANCAP:
Project Manager: Adela Casero
ANCAP counterpart for the dimensions and measures definition: Sergio Figueroa and Juan Jose Aristoy