Teradata
Assembly Line
Boeing transforms into data-driven business; data powers innovation and integration
The Boeing Company executives and engineers are tapping into value of data, using data-management and -analytics hardware and software, to drive product development and integration, as well as strengthen their competitive edge with enhanced, fact-based decision-making.
Boeing officials and engineers opted to organize and analyze the company’s data, applying data management and analytics tools from Teradata, and to take actions based on insights gleaned from that data that would help them achieve their strategic vision. Boeing transformed into, and now operates as, a fact-based, data-driven culture.
One goal was to provide self-service business intelligence (BI) to 20,000 internal and external users in company-wide divisions (human resources, finance, etc.) and the global supply chain through an integrated data warehouse. In doing so, Boeing information technology (IT) and business specialists had to find common definitions across business units and transform the systems infrastructure, which included consolidating hundreds of data mart. (A data mart is the access layer of the data warehouse environment used to provide data to the user; data marts are connected to and subsets of the data warehouse, a central repository.)
Using data from sources as diverse as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and airplane “black boxes” to drive timely decisions at a massive scale demands new approaches. Boeing officials, including subject-matter experts, business personnel, and data scientists/specialists, partnered with Teradata to devise and institute that innovative approach.
Boeing’s sensor data pipeline supports high-value analytics with the use of parallel databases, Hadoop, and Teradata QueryGrid, which connects Teradata and Hadoop systems enabling seamless multi-system analytics on a massive scale. Temporal SQL solves time alignment, latency and scale challenges, enabling interactive analytics that were previously impossible, officials describe.