DSS IN VIRGIN MOBILE

I will explain the Decision Support System of ``Virgin


Mobile . Based in Trowbridge , Wiltshire , U .K . the company is one of the

major mobile operators in the country . The company uses Oracle as an

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP ) platform and SQL server as an

Online Analytical Processing /Data Warehousing platform . Speaking about

ERP the company does not have any out of the box ERP system . The company

instead uses custom applications designed in Oracle as per ERP model .

Though strictly speaking Oracle is not an ERP , but its latest release ,

which Virgin Mobile has implemented , has the functionality to customize

applications as per ERP model . So we can say that use an ERP system

designed in Oracle .

For data warehousing and Decision Support or in other words Business

intelligence they use SQL server 2005 platform . The data servers are

primarily Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Servers and hold many terabytes

of data with a robust backup system .

For DSS or BI the company uses tools based on SQL server Business

Intelligence technologies like SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS ) and

SQL Server Reporting Services . SSAS is a tool in the SQL server , which

provides online analysis services and data mining services on the SQL

server platform . It supports multi dimensional OLAP , relational OLAP and

hybrid OLAP as well . It has a XML based data definition language , and

also uses XML for analysis .

Another important tool used for DSS in SQL server platform is SQL Server

Reporting Services (SSRP . It is basically server based report

generation software used to generate reports based on SSAS . SSRS can

generate reports in a variety of formats including PDF , Excel , CSV , XML

and TIFF and HTML . Primarily SSRS uses Report Definition Language (RDL ,

which is an XML , based markup language . The reports are designed with

Microsoft Visual Studio with BI plug-in installed , though SSRS has its

own report builder built-in but it does not offer that flexibility and

functionality required for today 's BI reporting . In order to allow end

users interaction with the data SQL server creates a Report Web Server

and users interact with it with a tool called Report Manager . With the

help of Report Manager the viewers can view and manage reports and also

administer data sources and security .

The day-to-day transactions are handled by the system designed in

Oracle i .e . OLTP , then at the end of the day all the new transactions

are loaded in the OLAP /Data Warehouse . There the tools developed by SSAS

analyze the new data and then the reports are finally generated in SSRS .

The company uses SSAS for analyzing the data regarding the business

processes of finance , human resource management and marketing .

In the finance process the data is analyzed regarding the profitability

analysis...