Client Description

Ryder System, Inc. provides a continuum of logistics, supply chain, and transportation management solutions worldwide. The Company’s offerings range from full-service leasing, commercial rental and maintenance of vehicles to integrated services. The Company also offers comprehensive supply chain solutions, logistics management services, and e-Commerce solutions.

Challenge

Ryder corporation purchased SAS for their analytics reporting needs. The software was capable of merging all of the various pieces of enterprise data into analytic reports; however, the software lacked the capability to acquire their data from the various source systems and platforms.
Building a typical data acquisition process has plenty of challenges with data record quantities, data matching, and processing time windows. However, performing this task on a wide variety of source systems, which included various Oracle, DB2 AS/400, DB2 UDB, SQL Server, and source system files, can be a challenge when trying to write it all to a set of Netezza tables within a specific time window in an organized and maintainable process. In addition to the variety of systems, the quantity of data was in the terabytes, and was spread across over 50 independent nodes. This required capturing only changed data, but most of the source systems did not have record modification information in the source data.

Solution

The iOLAP Data Management Architects collaborated with the various subject matter experts at Ryder to devise source system processes that would identify new or modified data. Then the iOLAP Data Management Architects worked with iOLAP Data Management Developers to create the data acquisition processes.

Benefits

The resulting set of tables in Netezza are populated within the defined time window, and with all of the data needed for SAS. SAS was able to easily gather and process the data, and produce the required analytical reports in a timely manner.