London Underground (LU) has undergone significant restructuring to
support the Public Private Partnership (PPP), which will see it
being divided into four companies, three of which will come under
private ownership in 2001.
To support this restructuring and the management of LU's £1bn
annual spend on maintenance and development, LU has implemented
WebIntelligence, the integrated query and reporting solution
supplied by Business Objects' solutions provider Blueprint
Management Systems.
Procon, one of the specialist application service providers for LU,
extensively redeveloped traditional reporting structures with the
aid of Blueprint. "Blueprint's training and skills transfer ensured
we were self sufficient in the technology very quickly," says Rob
Chambers, IT business manager at Procon.
Business Objects has proved extremely valuable to LU, giving its
management up-to-date on-line information. In the past there was a
three to four day delay in producing management statistics. "It
takes seconds to find out how much work a specific contractor is
doing across LU," says Chambers. "That information would have meant
painstaking manual investigation in the past." Other business
benefits include:
- Reporting on financial forecasting and project planning
- Reporting against key performance indicators for the
Treasury
- Cross database reporting
- Rapid ad hoc information querying
- Improved information quality
- Improved information sharing
Working with Blueprint, LU is now looking at using WebIntelligence
and is currently using the solution for piloting the publishing of
information on an intranet. This will open up information access
across LU to an even broader range of users. It will also help
support the increased need for information sharing as the companies
move into PPP.
"There is a clear need for co-operation between companies,"
explains Chambers. "Whatever direction LU decides to take,
Blueprint has developed future-proof technology to support that."