Customer Story
Mining Company
This global resource company has mines operating around the world.
Every new mine they build is a very complex and expensive endeavor. To avoid delays and costly overruns, they wanted a faster and more intuitive way to see the accurate completion status from across thousands of different construction tasks.
But until ObjectSharp created a new integrated Data & Analytics platform for them, they had no easy way to do that.
KEY TECHNOLOGIES USED
- Azure Data Lake
- Power Bi
- Azure Sql Database
- Azure Logging
- Azure Databricks
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Building a new mine is a mammoth undertaking. It is an extremely complex construction project that can cost hundreds of millions – even billions – of dollars. And there are thousands of different inter-related construction tasks to manage and monitor.
In order to identify and correct issues before they can cause delays and expensive overruns, the mining company needed a much faster way to see the completion status across the entire project.
Since many different software products are used to manage these construction projects, the data they needed to see was in proprietary data stores, in different forms and formats, across these different products.
So there was no simple way for the mining company to quickly get an accurate and consolidated view of the completion status for the entire project.
ObjectSharp was asked to develop a solution to solve this problem.
HOW WE HELPED OUR CLIENT
After their initial investigation, ObjectSharp identified three key issues with the data that were required to show completion status across the project: 1) the data were scattered in many different systems and formats (Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server and Oracle databases, and other proprietary systems), 2) the data needed to be transformed and made consistent to be ready for reporting and 3) users needed a secure centralized location to build and view new reports.
ObjectSharp decided that an integrated Data & Analytics platform was required to provide a consolidated view from all these disparate data.
The first step was to transform the different data formats and data stores into a standard JSON format in a consolidated Azure Data Lake. Then they used Databricks technology to transform the different data types into a standardized format. These processed data were then moved into a second Azure Data Lake, before being loaded into a new Azure SQL Database.
This created an easy-to-use reporting data warehouse for the users.
Based on their experience, ObjectSharp was able to use Power BI to create reusable, tabular data models for reporting from the data warehouse. These models provided a consistent and intuitive sematic model for the users. They generated high-performing dashboards and reports. And they eliminated many typical reporting errors by providing the users with an accurate ‘single version of the truth’.
ObjectSharp’s new Data & Analytics Platform consolidated data from many different sources. Now the mining company has a quick and accurate way see the completion status for an entire mine construction project.
“Using Azure technologies, we also built a custom portal that allowed the mine management to see how their new Data & Analytics platform was being used. Azure logging allowed us to track every Power BI dashboard and report that was run. And the security system we implemented ensured that users could only report on the data that related to their own business units,” said Kristie Laplante, Sr. Data & Analytics Consultant, ObjectSharp.