Customer Story

Adif moves at high speed with real-time intelligence

Provide a single point of access to information from a wide variety of systems and applications by building a data warehouse and using robust analytics to provide company-wide reporting and analytics

Headquarters

Madrid

Industry

Transportation and Logistics

Technology

ibi data platform; ibi analytics platform

Profile

Adif, a public corporation formed after passage of the Railway Industry Law in 2005, is a railway systems administrator in Madrid, Spain.

Single-source access to quality data

Real-time, insights-driven decisions

Extensive integration capabilities

Challenge

Adif manages enormous amounts of unstructured data that resides in a wide variety of different applications. “In the Infrastructure Maintenance area alone, we have over 40 operational applications working – most without a corporate strategy or governance,” says Eduardo Saiz, the information systems cabinet manager for the Conventional Lines Infrastructure Maintenance Unit in Adif’s Control, Administration and Information Systems Management Department. “The same kind of information is repeated in different systems, but presented based on each application’s profile. This approach to finding specific information is time consuming and results in confusion and inaccuracies.”

Solution

The Regional Transport department built a centralized database and established the upload function to move all its application data to its new data warehouse. At the corporate level, Adif chose the ibi analytics platform as its corporate business intelligence (BI) standard. It upgraded the company’s installation, improving information analysis, adding advanced functionalities, and improving user-friendliness. “We wanted everyone with managerial responsibilities to have the information they needed to make decisions, in a single tool,” Saiz explains.

Control panels were also a key component of Adif’s advanced analysis system. A database with well-structured, quality information turned out to be essential.

Benefits

In Adif’s complex environment, which includes technology tools such as IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere Application Server, and Oracle, the company deployed the ibi analytics platform on a blade infrastructure running SUSE Linux. This solution guarantees scalability, offering the added benefit of extensive integration capabilities through the ibi data platform. According to Saiz, the ibi data platform “…is a 3G integration tool that extends the reach of our analytical environment to connect with both Oracle and DB2.”

The integration is one of the company’s key steps toward real-time intelligence. Saiz comments, “We aim to centralize that data in the warehouse to facilitate real-time decision-making.”

Read the Case Study

“

The objective we set for ourselves is for each person with managerial responsibilities to have all the information that he or she needs to make a decision, in a single tool.”

Eduardo Saiz

IS Cabinet Manager

Adif

See more industry-related content