WorldMART Data Mart Enriches Pride International's Financial Analysis

Based in Houston, Texas, Pride International, Inc. is one of the world' s largest drilling contractors, performing onshore and offshore drilling and related services in more than 15 countries.

In a span of just three years, Pride has grown from a small, domestic operation to a global organization with five thriving business divisions. Along with Pride's expansion into the global market has come the need for better access to information between operations. This required enterprise-class IT solutions.

"All of a sudden, the executives at headquarters had to oversee several companies, each with its own processes, policies, and systems," says Yvonne Donohoe, chief information officer at Pride. "The highest priority was solving the difficulties stemming from having dissimilar financial systems and procedures. We had no easy way to obtain a unified view of the operating performance of the company."

Exploring Technology Options

Donohoe decided that a data mart solution would meet the company's short- and long-term business requirements for global information consolidations and sharing. But she knew data warehousing would require careful architectural planning and extensive development work to be successful. She also knew that building such systems from scratch would be a massive undertaking, which is why so many companies are turning to packaged data mart solutions. So, instead of creating a new system, she concentrated her efforts on finding a packaged data mart solution that could be quickly linked to the J.D. Edwards OneWorld financial system already in place at Pride. "There were three potential data marts available for the J.D. Edwards environment," continues Donohoe. "Information Builders' WorldMART best met Pride's business requirements."

Drilling for Data with WorldMART

WorldMART is an integrated set of tools for data access, data transformation, data migration, and reporting that Information Builders created expressly for the J.D. Edwards application environment. In fact, the WorldMART analytical application was designed in partnership with J.D. Edwards and uses a financial data model provided by J.D. Edwards to populate the data mart. Donohoe arranged for a demonstration with Pride's key executives, who, she explains, "were quick to see the benefits." According to Donohoe, "It is essential to have a clear understanding of the business requirements and to ensure buy-in from top-level management. She advises, "If executives understand the benefits, it's easy to get them involved." Pride's executives, Donohoe says, were behind the solution 100 percent. "They agreed that WorldMart matched our requirements and encouraged me to move forward immediately with the data mart project."

After a three-month trial period, Pride determined that WorldMART met its expectations, so a multi-disciplinary team of the company's business analysts, Information Builders' consultants, and IT pros shifted into high gear to fully implement the solution.

"WorldMART needs to be set up to reflect your specific organization and data structures," Donohoe adds. "But all the pieces are there, and they are already well integrated. It took us a short period of time to get it configured, and the process of doing this has helped us understand how our global operations can better fit together."

Striking Success

Reflecting on their busy implementation schedule, Donohoe says the WorldMART project was a success due to the close involvement of the executive team. With WorldMART, Pride now has an easy way to obtain a unified view of its operating performance.

Donohoe and the Pride team will soon turn their attention to the next focus for WorldMART, which will be to work with Pride's executives to build into WorldMART the ability to track operations globally. This next step will help them create a scorecard for their business that will also let them track key information on corporate finances, HR, equipment, and projects over time.