Data Warehouse Solution

CHALLENGE:

A steamship equipment depot management facility that stores and repairs equipment for some of the largest steamship companies in the world had the following challenges:

• Sharing information among its multiple facilities.
• Providing customers with timely and credible repair estimates.
• Providing timely and accurate information to their customers regarding their equipment.
• Providing customers with an interface that would allow them to view equipment activity, approve repairs and create bookings.
• Providing customers data that can be integrated into their own systems and applications.

PROFIT IMPROVEMENT BENEFITS

Repair estimates that are more credible, accurate and timely lead to more repair approvals which led to higher sales. Reducing labor resources via the hand-held, online reports and business to business transactions reduces our client’s expenses.

SOLUTION:

Working together with our client, Aptude built a robust data warehouse application that allowed the depot’s customers to access the new enterprise system via a secure Internet connection.

• Gate activity (storage) was captured in real-time using a hand-held device with images that updated a live database via a 802.11 b connection.
• Repair estimates were also generated on the hand-held unit as intermodal equipment came into the depot. The repair estimates were also sent to the database via an 802.11 connection. Once the repair was stored in the database, a scheduled job would electronically notify the depot’s client that a repair estimate was created for a particular unit and an approval or disapproval action was needed. With password authority to view the repair estimate and the images related to the repair, the depot’s client could then approve or disapprove the repair estimate.

The new hand-held/repair piece can potentially save days in the repair estimating process. Furthermore, the new application sends hourly data feeds to its customers in the format they require. This is truly a business-to-business application that has increased labor efficiencies, provided immediacy and increased customer satisfaction.