Business Intelligence Success Story

TimberWest

TimberWest Forest Corp. is uniquely positioned as the largest owner of private forest lands in western Canada. The Company's 334,000 hectares, providing a sustainable annual harvest of 2.5 million m³ of logs, are located on Vancouver Island and predominantly support the growth of Douglas Fir forests, a premium species used for structural purposes.

Challenge

TimberWest was challenged with the business risk of relying on an unstable legacy inventory system. To mitigate this risk, TimberWest embarked on a business system consolidation and renewal strategy to replace their existing legacy inventory system. Replacement of this inventory system, also necessitated replacement of an existing data mart that had been built based on the legacy system’s data structure. To replace the legacy data mart, TimberWest decided to build a new enterprise wide data warehouse that could accommodate future changes in business drivers, monitoring and analytics.

Solution

Ideaca Knowledge Services worked with TimberWest to implement an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) solution. Ideaca’s team designed the data warehouse to replace the existing inventory data mart and established a flexible and scalable framework to support TimberWest’s future plans to consolidate their financial analytics onto the new EDW solution.

The new data marts were designed and built using SQL Server leveraging Analysis Services to enable robust analytics and also to support the ProClarity front-end Business Intelligence tool. The EDW solution was designed to improve access to analytical information and automated the delivery of static information. A key aspect of Ideaca’s role was to transfer knowledge to TimberWest staff to enable TimberWest to take on future EDW extension and enhancement projects.

Benefits

The Enterprise Data Warehouse solution Ideaca implemented for TimberWest resolved several core business issues and provided significant benefits:

  • Delivery of mission critical business information related to the new inventory system, at the point of go-live
  • Ability to have business oriented information delivery and analytics based on the new inventory system
  • Ability to analyze the combined information of both the new and legacy supply chain management systems
  • Scalable and flexible platform to enable future inclusion of other business information not yet in the new data warehouse
  • Capability to readily dive deeper into data for more accurate business insight and analysis