Coast Guard takes flight with BI

Hampered by a cumbersome analytics system housed in two separate databases and a 13-year-old reporting system, the U.S. Coast Guard aviation center needed help getting its planes off the ground.

So, the military branch turned to a business intelligence (BI) system that would keep 6,000 users at 26 airfields connected to the central system.

The Coast Guard Aircraft Repair & Supply Center in Elizabeth City, N.C., handles logistics for all Coast Guard flights, including flight schedules, tracking repairs and operational systems. It needed a system that could address all those areas, provide a reporting tool and extend that system to remote users.

It was imperative that Coast Guard Aviation had a Web-accessible application, said Steve Shrum, a senior information systems engineer with McLean, Va.-based RS Information Systems, an integrator contracted to work with the Coast Guard.

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Three years ago, Coast Guard Aviation implemented the Series 7 PowerPlay from Ottawa-based Cognos Inc.

"Before the end user had to log in to two separate systems," Shrum said. "We wanted to interface those so the end user didn't have to."

With air stations on both coasts, as well as Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico, a variety of geographically dispersed users needed to be able to access the system, which wasn't possible under the disparate legacy system. Remote personnel had to log requests through IT. Additionally, prior to the BI implementation, Coast Guard Aviation had difficulty tracking the location of parts within the supply chain. Because of this, people would reorder parts on a high-priority basis, tying up inventory and driving up costs.

Now, an officer who wants to schedule a flight logs into the portal system and puts in a request. That request is extended to a maintenance officer who checks availability against the system and performs the required maintenance.

The servers and data are located in Elizabeth City and are secured through the Coast Guard's own security system and an ID and password functionality prebuilt within Cognos.

The Coast Guard Aviation also runs roughly 350 reports through the system and is in the process of converting another 200 character-based reports into Web documents.

The payoff has been significant, Shrum said. A cost-benefit analysis conducted in 2003 showed $8.4 million in benefits for a one-year period, thanks in part to the elimination of two paper-based systems that are now automated.

Though Coast Guard Aviation still had to create an implementation team, the military environment simplified the user adoption problem, Shrum said.

Coast Guard Aviation did some customization, adding extra security and a help desk link.

According to Shrum, the success of the system has drawn interest from fellow government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol.