A global energy company
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A single version of the truth
The challenge
IPL's client is one of the world's largest global energy companies, generating revenue in excess of $240 billion in 2004. The enterprise has grown vastly over the years. This growth has mainly been inorganic in nature, due to large number of takeovers, mergers and acquisitions of other related petrochemical companies.
As a result, there are now many disparate systems supporting the same processes across the enterprise. There is currently no single system or data source that can be interrogated to find details of all the products manufactured and sold by our client or details of all the customers that our client has on its books across the enterprise.
The provision of enterprise-wide, ‘single version of the truth’ Master Data repositories, would rationalise the current plethora of data sources. This would better inform management, resulting in increased revenue; reduced risk (due to compliance related issues) and reduced costs (as a result of reduction in duplicated effort). The predicted resultant organic growth would have substantial monetary benefits to our client.
This need to effectively manage Master Data across the entire enterprise was the driving force for the involvement of IPL during the early stages of our client's Master Data programme. The initial challenge was to produce a convincing business case and generate sufficient interest amongst the diverse business units within the enterprise, for the adoption of the Master Data concept.
The solution
IPL initially provided consultancy expertise, working with our client's own Enterprise Architecture Group to define a Master Data development approach. This approach was tightly coupled with our client's own project definition methodology and recommended how to take a prescribed data subject area (e.g. customer data) from conception through to provision in a central data repository, available to the entire enterprise.
In parallel to this initial consultancy task, one specific data subject area (Geographic Master Data) was chosen to illustrate the value of the Master Data approach. A variety of different business areas were consulted to determine their Master Data needs. International external providers of this Master Data were investigated together with the standards which should apply (e.g. ISO, UN, ITU etc). A Geographic data repository and associated web-based delivery mechanisms were successfully constructed and hosted within our client's domain. The required Geographic Data content was procured from a carefully selected third party supplier together with the associated provenance information. This was also published to the business through the bespoke web-based interface.
An end-to-end demonstration of the Master Data concept was also developed using an existing “Person” directory system. This was rewritten to be a consumer of Geographic Master Data to demonstrate how the Master Data concept would work in practice. Web services were implemented to provide the interface between the Master Data Repository and the consuming directory system.
The highlights
A methodology was developed providing a standard, consistent, repeatable technique for developing Master Data independent of data subject area. This approach was delivered to all development teams and partners via an intranet portal.
Consistent, accurate Master Data for the first of the data subject areas was successfully made available to the enterprise. Data provenance and details of the applicable standards was provided in an easily available form via the IPL-developed catalogue feature released with the prototype. To support the further roll-out of the concept, Master Data training and education workshops were delivered in multiple countries.
A Business system consuming and contributing Master Data via an Enterprise Repository was clearly demonstrated for the first time. Evidence of a decoupled Master Data repository distributing Master Data via web services was demonstrated in action.