In the spring of 2018, EiSYS announced an internal tender to support the implementation of creative ideas within the organization - and internal innovation. According to the company's slogan (You have the mine, we have the miners) the name of the tender is "Miner program". Our team has been organized on a voluntary basis and started in the category of "Data Exploitation Opportunities", based on the guiding principle of being a business intelligence related, data exploitation company, to use our existing knowledge to help our own work, to make our processes (planning, controlling, etc.) more transparent. We develop decision support systems for our clients, so we believed of course that we could generate useful information from our data, which could be gained at our place, that would help the management to monitor processes more effectively including the designation of the strategic orientations as well, moreover that would help project managers to manage and organize the operational, day-to-day work.

According to the application material and project plan elaborated by a team of 5, the management approved the project, so the team obtained the dedicated time specified in the call for the application and the technical conditions for the implementation of the project.

The task was complex, as a complete "mini data warehouse" had to be built to achieve the ultimate goal, the sub-tasks were full-field from surveying the needs through the report development to the documentation of the task. The team had all the needed competencies: data warehouse consultants, BI consultants, software engineers, business consultants, project management.

During the implementation of the project, we were focusing on the preparation phase. For surveying the needs we made personal interviews, looking for the best outcome product that we could deliver within the available time and with the greatest benefit for the management and project managers.

The collected information was discussed by the team in workshops and as the project became specified, we could start the development.

The achieved result during carrying out the project points beyond those problems we have solved, and those reports we have prepared. The project resulted a complex system in which, besides fulfilling the objectives of this project, carries itself its simple and effective further improvements. Since we created a data warehouse and a data mart built-on it located on a separate server to serve the data requirements of the reports, so we do not burden the source system by adding any additional functionality. The data can be stored historically, and we took into account during planning of the loading that other source systems can be added later.

Additional reports using the data warehouse can be easily implemented, and it is easy and quick to customize the existing reports.

In the final phase of the project, the technical documentation was prepared and the team listed further development opportunities (eg. creating a unified report, data cleaning, reporting on mobile devices, etc.).

The success of the project is shown by the fact that this complex task - from the surveying of the needs to the project closure - was managed with a relatively low resource effort. According to our experience a similar project could be finished by this team in one month. The implemented reports are now in daily use supporting our company’s daily operation.

The road to further development and further use has also been opened, and the development of additional controlling reports using our data warehouse has begun. To summary in a nutshell, what we have achieved: We have the mine.

Márk Kelemen