Bell Helicopter
Bell Helicopter is the world’s leading provider of vertical lift aircraft and the inventor of the first tilt rotor aircraft, a remarkable aircraft that lifts like a helicopter, then flies like an airplane with twice the speed, three times the payload and five times the range of traditional helicopters. In recent years, business intelligence has emerged as a key factor in the company’s drive for operational excellence and competitiveness.
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Bell Helicopter chose Zend® Server and the Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) analytic database to improve its large-scale enterprise reporting application for better business intelligence. Known as Premier, the Bell Helicopter application dynamically captures and reports on real-time and historical data from more than 40 different data sources originating from financial, HR, manufacturing, ERP and other systems across the organization.
Challenge
To compete for defense contracts over $20M, Bell Helicopter must meet 32 government-mandated guidelines for compliance with earned value management (EVM) reporting. In-depth project forecasting and reporting during the design and manufacture of complex aircraft necessarily involves large volumes of data drawn from systems across the organization. As business grows and data proliferates, so, too, do end user reporting requirements. This places heavy demands upon enterprise reporting systems to deliver faster business intelligence, and an increased burden for IT and system/database administrators. When EVM reporting problems arose at Bell Helicopter, leading to instances of late and over-cost aircraft, the company temporarily lost its certification and faced more than $40M in government contract withholds. Query performance was lagging, and the EVM Systems Group had little visibility into the production environment. Consequently, end user support was labor-intensive, involving manual screen captures and long trial and error troubleshooting sessions to resolve issues over the phone. Meanwhile, VIPs and other business and engineering users were waiting for their data. With the company’s explosive data growth, storage was also becoming an issue. The company needed to revamp its reporting system for improved automation and performance while keeping costs under control.
The Premier application is strategic to Bell Helicopter’s business. Zend and Infobright are helping us ensure that users get fast access to the business intelligence they need—while automating and streamlining application development and data administration. With the combined solution we are delivering essential performance and storage upgrades while remaining well within budget.
- Scott Hathaway, Manager of EVM Reporting and Analysis, Bell Helicopter
Solution
The EVM Systems Group laid plans to overhaul its enterprise reporting system targeting significant improvements in application responsiveness, high availability, scalability and resource utilization. Software from Zend Technologies and Infobright were brought into the EVM Systems Group’s WAMP-based development and production environments, providing much-needed tools for application development and management and database analytics. The group’s developers ran the Zend PHP stack and Infobright® Enterprise Edition analytic database on their Windows laptops with local copies of MySQL. The Premier application has more than 1500 pages and it draws from a decade’s worth of data from 40 different data sources. Uncompressed, there’s an estimated 60G of data. On any given day, close to 3,000 Bell Helicopter VIPs, engineers, administrative staff and government clients access Premier’s web-based dashboard for on-demand access to real-time and historical HR, financials, earned value data, cost and schedule information, MRP, quality and other data.
By deploying Infobright Enterprise Edition, we achieved a dramatic 10:1 data compression rate, and we were able to speed analytic queries on executive dashboards by up to 500 percent, with no indexing, partitioning or database tuning required.
- Scott Hathaway, Manager of EVM Reporting and Analysis, Bell Helicopter
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The Analytic Data Warehouse
Traditional data warehouse products put a tremendous burden on IT in order to create and maintain an environment that will allow users to query against large volumes of data.
