The smart decision

By Dino Philaretou

How one company developed a packaged business intelligence (BI) solution for the maritime Industry.

Cosine Consultants Ltd is a Cyprus-based consulting company, established more than a decade ago, specialising in both packaged solutions. Cosine has developed and enhanced its extensive knowledge of various industries, and custom enterprise solutions developed according to specific customer requirements, such as database-driven and BI solutions for small and medium businesses, multinational organisations and the government. BI, in particular, is an area in which considerable experience and expertise has been acquired.

There are several reasons why BI solutions are custom solutions. First and foremost, they must provide a consolidated view over the data of an organisation. This view should conform to the organization's reporting and performance monitoring needs. Given the disparity of these needs, arising from differences in organisational structures, legal requirements and established processes, no one-size-fits-all solution can be devised. Moreover, in order to obtain the necessary data from the organisation's operational systems and massage it into an appropriate presentation form, an extract transform and load (ETL) process needs to be implemented. Again, given the diversity of data sources at different organisation sites, often including several systems, databases and spreadsheets, custom development becomes imperative.

This, however, invariably means increased implementation costs. In the current challenging economic climate, it is both ironic and unfortunate that the companies that stand to gain the most from the deployment of a BI solution are also the ones who are most reluctant to shoulder this cost. Consequently, BI solutions can no longer be promoted on their merits alone, such as better resource utilisation and planning, improved operational efficiency and increased customer satisfaction, to name but a few. Steps must also be taken to reduce the cost of providing a BI solution to such increasingly reticent clients. That is why we have made a strategic decision to develop the CUBIQ family of packaged BI solutions aimed at specific industries.

One of the first members of this product family, CUBIQ:Maritime, is aimed - as the name clearly indicates - at the Maritime industry. During the design and development of this as well as all other CUBIQ products, several decisions were made in order to reduce the implementation cost. The most important of these decisions was to develop the product around a fixed view,  in the form of a dimensional model, over the data describing the business areas of a typical maritime company, such as financials, vetting, crewing, marine and safety and operations. For each area, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) is also provided, along with a selection of interactive dashboards incorporating powerful data visualisations and drill down capabilities. All of these were developed through a combination of experiences accumulated during the development of BI solutions for maritime companies, a survey of international environmental and safety maritime standards and, last but not least, the input of academic experts. The goal was to cover the needs of most maritime customers without resorting to customised implementation, save for the development of the ETL process. Moreover, in areas where most maritime companies are not expected to capture any data electronically, such as vetting inspections, special data capture screens have been developed.

Although CUBIQ:Maritime was designed as a quick and cost-effective way for deploying a BI solution in an organisation, it is by all means an enterprise-level solution. Special care has been taken to optimise both its performance and scalability, allowing it to handle large volumes of data in a short amount of time. Moreover, it has been designed with extensibility in mind. As customer needs evolve, the product can be enhanced with custom extensions, something that is still cheaper than a fully customised BI solution. In conclusion, we believe that packaged BI solutions will provide a cost-effective - yet in no way compromised - option to cost-conscious customers, allowing them to start reaping the benefits of BI in a relatively short amount of time.

Dino Philaretou is a Senior Consultant with more than 28 years in the IT industry. Since 1994, he has been involved in the development of several BI solutions for the public sector as well as the retail and maritime industries. He currently heads the BI division at Cosine Consultants Ltd.