| dc.description.abstract | A Study on Electronic Patrol System Improvement – The Case of Company “A”
Abstract
In the cement industry, it is necessary to monitor the operating status of facilities in order to ensure smooth operations and to prevent environment safety hazards. However, a typical cement factory occupies a vast territory, and is faced with severe level of dust. Therefore, it is impractical to deploy video surveillance systems to monitor the entire factory. As a result that manual patrol procedures have to be implemented. The traditional patrol procedure requires all records be written and kept on paper. There are many potential problems with the paper-based system: it is impossible to ensure that the assigned staff was at right place at the right time as expected, and filled in the requisite data; and it is difficult for supervisors to audit the patrol records. Hence, company “A” decided to deploy an electronic patrol system to solve the problem.
The initial success resulting in an all out deployment covering all 11 factories in Company “A”. While the electronic patrol system result in vast improvements, it generates a tremendous amount of patrol records, causing performance bottle necks. The performance problems are multifold, including data aggregation, report generation, response to inquiry, excessive time for server/PDA connections (downloading patrol assignments and uploading patrol records, etc. In addition, the patrol data from the 11 plants are not integrated, thus management in the headquarter has to access the data one factory at a time. Moreover, the data is so complicated that daily reports are only available on the next day, making realtime visibility a much desirable feature.
This study aims to provide a solution to integrate the independent databases across all factories, and to solve the database performance issue. First, we propose to establish a new OLAP structure, along with the current OLTP database, so as to limit OLTP table data growth, and to reduce Cartesian product in database joins. Second, we propose to use ETL tools to push OLAP table from each plant to headquarter for automatic data aggregation. Third, the development of business intelligence features are also proposed. Finally, we employ mobile devices to provide senior managers with realtime patrol records, so that realtime visibility can be achieved.
Keyword: OLAP, ETL, Cube, mobile device.
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