NCP faces up to congestion with online analytical processing

Rethink IT, Oct, 2004

* For a company that runs car parking Facilities for the larger part of its revenues, putting a congestion charge on every car that comes into our major cities can have a catastrophic effect on revenues.

How much worse that effect might he if the IT systems of the company concerned are not up to the task of keeping track of the outcome.

That's more or less where the UK's National Car Parks (NCP) found itself when the London Mayor decided that it would be a good idea to make every car pay a charge to enter London.

It was just as well the company's management had already decided that it was time to take the IT systems out of the dark ages and bring some sophisticated reporting to the business, and it's in that project that John Andrew, planning and analysis controller for NCP, found the answers to just how to respond to the congestion charge.

"The congestion charge meant that there was a 20% drop in business at our London car parks," explained Andrew. But before it had established its Applix TM1 forecasting and reporting system, it wouldn't have known which tariffs where affected by the congestion charge, so it wouldn't have been able to respond.

NCP'S BACKGROUND

Understanding NCP'S background gives us a better grasp of what a leap forward it has achieved using one of the original OLAP tools.

It was grown over almost 50 years by two entrepreneurs into several hundred car parks, and valued highly partly because of the number of properties it had come to own all over the UK.

Initially sold to US-based conglomerate Cendant for 801m [pounds sterling] ($1.45bn by today's currency conversion) in 1998, it changed hands yet again in May 2002 for more like 888m [pounds sterling] ($1.6bn).

Today it has around 800 car parks, 4,000 staff, over 70,000 parking spaces and it caters for 60m parking visits each year as Europe's biggest non-municipal off-street parking operator.

The new buyer is VC group Cinven, and it has set about updating the operation and focusing on what NCP is good at. Parking.

Cinven's strategy is to recreate the company as a parking services business. The most fundamental initiative has been to separate the operating company from the property assets by a sale and leaseback transaction.

Cinven has targeted improvement of the core off-street car parks, with the additional business of developing on-street and off-street parking management contracts.

"The new management realized that a lot of reporting needed to be put in place. Venture capitalists probably prefer even more reporting than usual hands on management anyway, but the new owners wanted to get to understand our business deeply.

"And we were trying to deliver all this information in a series of linked spreadsheets. We knew that we needed a more advanced tool. My mission is to take spreadsheets out of this company. These guys wanted five year plans, budgets and forecasts," said Andrew.

Andrew is attached to the finance department and it was clear from the beginning of the project that its finance department would have to own the finished product. Finance didn't want to be constantly asking IT to help all the time.

"It was a fairly amateur approach 1 suppose, but we did a suitability matrix and appointed a steering group and invited companies to bid," said Andrew. But the company didn't feel it was necessary to carry out a cost benefit analysis before or after the installation, because they knew they couldn't continue as they were. "The gains have been in the speed in which we can answer management questions and in the reduction in resources to achieve that.

"The fewer people the department has using up time trying to prepare reports, the more time they have to go about answering the questions that those reports pose--they can look into why some unanticipated event is happening," Andrew explained.

"We looked at Applix TM1, Oracle, Comshare's Decision, Hyperion's Essebase and Cognos Powerbase. In the end it was the channel partner Solaris 2000 that was very impressive. It showed TM1 was Excel-like enough for finance to own it, and we had IT source the hardware and install it."

TM1 is a multidimensional database. That means that live transactional data is placed into a reporting 'cube', which can be hit with queries or used to run off key management reports at timed intervals or on demand.

The cube came up to 600Mb of data, and it is hosted on a Compaq 4-CPU server, with 4Gb of Ram.

The data can be flushed into the TM1 cube in just a few minutes from the Oracle Financials package that NCP uses, as well as from its internally written Car Parks Management System that handles sales, payroll, visitor volumes and transactions. The Oracle part of this equation happens for NCP at month end, but Applix says this can just as easily be run in daily or hourly, and the ticket analysis data feed is, in fact, run daily.

TM1 offers rapid data integrator tools if companies need to update more frequently, so corporate data can be visible in summaries in minutes, rather than hours.

Its integrators work with any ODBC-compliant database and can import data from ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, or from other data warehouses.