Advanced FTI

Customizations

Deepshikhar TyagiOTM & Business Analytics Consultant

Infosys

Agenda• Introduction

• FTI Features

• FTI As Product

• General Pain Points

• Customized FTI Advantages

• FTI Customization Methodology

• OTM Design & Customization : Best Practice

• ODI Customization & Best Practice

• DB Customization & Best Practice

• BI Customization & Best Practice

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Introduction

• The presentation shares experiences and

best practices drawn from various FTI

implementation across different projects.

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FTI Features

• FTI offers interactive dashboards and reports that offer insight into transportation operations.

• The application contains prebuilt, role-based dashboards that help organizations to quickly analyze key performance indicators, reports, and metrics to spot trends and determine if business is on track.

• Quick visual status of performance such as: freight cost per mode, cost per mile, trailer utilization and on-time arrival rates

• Drives Continuous Improvement

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FTI Architecture Re-Visited

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FTI As Product

• Fusion Transportation Intelligence is a product integrated

with OTM : Not mere a module within OTM

• It has it’s own product life cycle, which should be in sync

with OTM

• Resources with strong technical background in OTM ,

ODI & OBIEE are required

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General Pain Points

• Integrating new OTM/FTI Business objects – Not everything in OTM is present in FTI

• Missing Data

• Heavy Technical Intervention

• Direct Database Requests – Lesser Flexibility

• Bulky Reports – Performance Issues

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End State (customized FTI) : Advantages &

Opportunities

• Minimum intervention by technical team for

creating reports

• Automated FTI Data purge

• Framework for Health Check – Frequent OTM-

FTI Data Reconciliation , Server health check,

FTI Data Object Management

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FTI Customization MethodologyBusiness Requirement

Assesment

Infrastructure

&

Architecture

Project Planning

Project Requirement Definition

Technical Analysis OTM Data-source

Design

FTI Data-Target Design

ODI Design

Meta Repository Design

ETL Development Data Mining

Meta Repository Development

Implementation

Unit Test

Integration Test Performance Test

User Acceptance

Roll Out & Monitoring

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OTM Design: Best Practice

• Report Team Involvement : Active participation of

reporting team using FTI while designing OTM solution

takes care of many issues at first hand.

• Impact Analysis of OTM Workflows: Table level impact in

OTM should be analyzed to check whether pertinent

mappings in FTI are getting impacted

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OTM Customization : Best Practice

• Refnums : Ideally design should have between max 25-30

refnums per OTM object for high data load. More refnums hit

down the performance severely !

• Flex Fields: Flex fields column available in OTM should be

judiciously used.

• Additional Columns & Tables: Additional column to existing

mapped tables is preferred. Going next step additional tables

should be kept at minimal level for efficient maintenance.

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ODI Customizations

• Managing ETL is the key part of FTI

• We not only can control what & how data goes

inside FTI from OTM but also can check and

constantly monitor data reconciliation between

two systems

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ODI Customizations: Best Practice

Check Knowledge Module (CKM) :

CKM is in charge of checking that records

of a data set are consistent with

defined constraints.

CKM Customizations lead to effective

tracking of error during and ETL loads and

Improved quality of data load to FTI

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ODI Customizations: Best Practice

For higher data loads customizing user

functions can improve the performance

and can reduce errors to a great extent.

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FTI DB Customizations

• Purging Strategy : Defining purging strategy is important

part of FTI DB Management. Usually data for past

couple of years is kept for historical analysis.

• There is no standard purging solution available yet but

customized scripts can be written. As a best practice FTI

shipment table should be center of the purging solution.

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Management of Materialized Views: Best Practice

• MVs are helpful to bring in the FTI objects which

are not mapped to Business Intelligence.

• Customized MVs refresh should be scheduled

on time intervals as existing OOB MVs are

refreshed via ETL and at instances it is seen that

it often results in deadlock

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BI Customization: Best Practice

• RPD Customization: Different business objects should not be

grouped together inside. Whereas customized MVs having related

objects are advised to be mapped together in BMM layer

• Right usage of System & BI Cache

• Eliminate Bulky Direct Database Requests – Not only affects

performance but creates unnecessary clutter at BI Server

• Optimum number of connections should be defined for a connection

pool. As a best practice anywhere between 150-200 connections are

kept for good performance

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FTI References

• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E38437_01/otm/

html/docset.html

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Thank You

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