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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