Sasol Oil has standardised on BrioQuery as the front-end for its users to query its functional databases.
A range of business users - 15 in all - at Sasol Oil`s head office in Randburg use BrioQuery on Windows 95 to access a variety of SQL Server databases to find trends, patterns and exceptions in the company`s business. The product and marketing teams use the information by geographic breakdown to determine who buys what, when and where, and they adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.
Brio was licensed to Sasol Oil and is supported by Abraxas Software.
Data is fed into these databases from Sasol`s production systems in Secunda. These were formerly mainframe-based Adabas, but the data has since been migrated to Oracle.
The SQL Server databases serve:
- Sales of all oil companies with figures published by Caltex. This is the largest of the databases, with more than 3,5m records.
- The 1 800 service stations which have a Sasol pump.
- Sasol`s sales to its own customers, spanning wholesale, garages, mechanics and more.
- The budgetay process, which requires three to five years` data.
Wiesner says Brio is critical for the business users to gain access to corporate data. "Before Brio IT presented the users with standardised reports, drawn using Access. Our users are not database-oriented and neither should they be. They need an easy, responsive front-end to access their data.
"With Brio they can generate quicker reports, get what they want, in the format they want, run ad hoc queries, and make decisions faster, and know what the data means."
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