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Trinity Overcame Critical Reporting Obstacles with Magnitude Angles for Oracle

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Trinity Industries is one of the nation’s leading diversified industrial companies, providing a variety of high-volume, repetitive products and services for the transportation, industrial, and construction sectors of the marketplace. Trinity operates in five distinct business groups: Trinity Rail Group, Trinity Railcar Leasing and Management Services Group, Inland Barge Group, Construction Products Group, and Industrial Products Group.

Challenges

After Trinity implemented Oracle Financials, initial reports were developed using standard Oracle tools by a third party. In order to provide their end-users with ad-hoc reporting capabilities, Trinity began implementing Discoverer for Oracle Applications using a small pilot team representing various Business Units.

Not only did Discoverer require a more sophisticated technical background than the pilot team anticipated, they also realized that an array of other challenges stood before them:

  • The data was fragmented and stored in thousands of transaction tables
  • The information was not reflected in business terms
  • An Oracle upgrade would require a rework of reports already created
  • There was not a Discoverer help file available

After attempting to develop custom views in Discoverer, Trinity realized that to continue with that approach would be expensive and time consuming. Following a thorough analysis, Trinity was left with four options:

  • Continue with the rollout as planned
  • Perform additional database development work
  • Hire additional internal report developers
  • Install a new solution to address the Discoverer issues identified by the pilot team

Solution

The first three options would require additional time and incur increased costs. Moreover, Trinity understood that the difficulty inherent in using these solutions would result in little or no end-user adoption. After looking at several other solutions, including Oracle DBI, and benchmarking with other companies that used Oracle Financials, Trinity chose Angles for Oracle to help solve the existing problems realized with Discoverer. In addition, Angles for Oracle was able to provide more than 500 out-of-the-box reports (175 Financials-related).

Trinity selected Angles for Oracle over other alternatives because Angles for Oracle eliminated the custom configuration and technical issues they encountered with Discoverer, as well as offering the content Trinity required “out-of-the-box”. The comprehensive Angles for Oracle Help File allowed non-technical users to easily navigate to the information they wanted to view, increasing user acceptance across the enterprise.

Results

Angles for Oracle implemented a complimentary solution that enhanced Discoverer, and enabled a much higher adoption rate and overall end-user satisfaction in reporting from Oracle. With Angles for Oracle, Trinity was able to overcome the obstacles it faced with Oracle Discoverer and provide its users with quick, easy access to their critical transactional data. End-users are now able to create their own ad hoc reports within minutes and hours compared to days. Users also have the critical report protection required during application upgrades so as not to create rework. With minimal training, users are able to customize and share reports without the use of IT resources. Trinity has trained over 100 end-users to create their own reports.

I had planned on spending at least two hours a day working with Magnitude Angles for Oracle when I began my job, but now it’s down to less than one hour every week.

Joseph Thakkolkaran Manager of Enterprise Applications Symmetricom Inc.

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