Customer Solution Case Study
/ Chevron Enhances Business Intelligence with Self-Service Analysis and Reporting Tools
“The self-service business intelligence features in SQL Server 2008 R2 will give our subject matter experts the tools they need to create their own dynamic reports. They will … have easy access to all their data.”
Stephen Walker, Enterprise Database Architect, Chevron Data Management Solutions
Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies with assets in more than 100 countries, encourages its employees to analyze data and create rich reports. Information Technology Company, a business unit of Chevron, deployed Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 toprovideChevron employeeswith self-service analysis and report creation capabilities. Users will be able to create enhanced reports with new visualization and analysis tools. The company has also improved the performance of one of its critical business intelligence applications.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published April 2010
Business Needs
Chevron, one of the world’s largest energy companies, was founded in California in 1879 as the Pacific Coast Oil Company. Today, Chevron has a presence in more than 100 countries, managing more than 24,000 retail sites and employing 60,000 people.
In 2009, Chevron added proved reserves equal to 112 percent of oil-equivalent production. During that same year, the company averaged production of 2.7 million net oil-equivalent barrels a day of, an increase of 7 percent.
Chevron Data Management Solutions— part of the Information Technology Company business unit at Chevron—manages thousands of databases, many of which are based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise data management software. These databases support critical applications, such as a businessintelligence (BI) application used to facilitate important business decisions.“Our mission-critical applications need to be running all hours of the day, every day,” says Stephen Walker, Enterprise Database Architect, Chevron Data Management Solutions. “Reliability is paramount for our business partners, and it is essential that we have highly available, low-cost, easy to operate solutions.”
Chevron also needed to give its employees more control over the data analysis and reporting process, in which the IT staff was heavily involved. “We have very knowledgeable, experienced subject matter experts, and we no longer wanted them to totally depend on IT for all aspects of report generation and management,” states Walker. “We needed to give them the ability to do self-service analysis and reporting.”
The company also wanted to get more out of its BI data related to oil reservoirs, wells, and other operations. “We wanted to do more mapping and spatial data in reports,” Walker says.
In August 2009, Chevron began the process of finding a new solution to meet these critical business needs.
Solution
Chevron decided to take advantage of its substantial investment in SQL Server by upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. The organization saw that the software could meet its needs for high availability, self-service reporting, and enhanced analysis capabilities.
Specifically, Chevron expressed interest in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services, which gives employees more self-service analysis tools so they can easily create BI reports and share them with other workers. The solution features Report Builder 3.0, which provides support for geospatial visualization through mapping, routing, and custom shape creation so users can create rich reports. Chevron employees can also take advantage of shared data sets in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services to share and store data sets outside reports.
Another new feature, Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel, contains components that integrate Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services with Microsoft Excel 2010.
Chevron began upgrading its database environment to SQL Server 2008 R2 in late 2009. Its high-profile business intelligence application was one of the first applications that it put into production on the new solution.
Benefits
With SQL Server 2008 R2, Chevron employees will be able to perform their own BI analysis and report creation. Chevron can also use new spatial features to improve its data analysis reports, and it has increased the performance of one of its most critical business applications.
Gives Users Self-Service Capabilities
With the new version of Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2, Chevron business users will be able to analyze data and create reports themselves, which removes that burden from IT. “The self-service business intelligence features in SQL Server 2008 R2 will give our subject matter experts the tools they need to create their own dynamic reports,” says Walker. “They will be able to simply go into SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services and click on Report Builder 3.0 and have easy access to all their data.”
Provides Better Business Intelligence Reporting
With Report Builder 3.0, Chevron employees will have access to new geospatial tools, which they will use to create visually enhanced reports. As a result, the company expects to get more out of its BI data. “We do a lot of spatial work at Chevron, in all business areas,” says Walker. “With SQL Server 2008 R2 Report Builder 3.0, we can unlock our business data and present it in a new, visually exciting way.” Also, Chevron workers will be able to use SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel to create analytical reports that integrate with Excel 2010 once the company implements that technology.
SQL Server 2008 R2 will also make it easier for Chevron employees to collaborate. “Using the shared data sets in SQL Server 2008 R2, our employees can easily share critical business data with colleagues,” says Walker. “Ultimately, that will help improve the overall quality of that data.”
Increases Availability and Performance
By running one of its most important applications on SQL Server 2008 R2, Chevron will improve system uptime and performance. “We were already pleased with the availability and performance that we had using SQL Server 2005,” says Walker. “But SQL Server 2008 R2 will help us improve that even more, especially in terms of creating online analytical processing cubes for data analysis. We have already noticed a database performance improvement as it applies to dimension processing of cubes, and we expect that to increase.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published April 2010