Summary

Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the Dutch national railway operator, needed a top-management KPI dashboard on top of an existing data warehouse. Three consulting firms had tried and failed. Stephan cracked the core DB2 integration problem within three days and delivered the full application solo in under two months.

Situation

NS required a monthly executive reporting application to surface KPI trends from their in-house data warehouse to around ten senior leaders. The technical blocker was the complexity of ingesting data through the DB2 integration layer — several consulting companies before LogicaCMG had been unable to get a working solution off the ground.

Tasks

• Understand and solve the DB2 data integration problem that had defeated three prior teams.
• Design and build an executive-facing KPI and trends dashboard on top of the existing data warehouse.
• Deliver a production-ready application within the engagement window.

Actions

Working as the sole developer on the engagement, Stephan analysed the DB2 data warehouse integration and produced a proof-of-concept within three days — demonstrating that the blocker was solvable and giving NS confidence to proceed.

He then built the full ASP.NET dashboard application using .NET 2.0, Enterprise Library, and Visual Studio 2003, with source control managed in SourceSafe 2005 on Windows Server 2003.

Results

• Working proof-of-concept delivered in 3 days after three other firms had failed entirely.
• Full executive reporting application completed and handed over within the engagement period.
• Dashboard adopted for monthly executive reporting by approximately 10 NS senior leaders.