OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency)

RRP Solutions provides Data Warehouse development and maintenance activities to the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). Activities include refreshing and maintaining the Data Warehouse environments, developing new warehouses and Data Marts, and implementing Business Intelligence tools.

The OCC needed RRP Solutions’ services to perform operations and maintenance of Enterprise Data Warehouse and the reporting front end. As new data is added to the databases, source systems are enhanced, and new data integration requirements are introduced. These data management activities require a significant amount of data conversion activities.

RRP Solutions maintains the metadata repository and the data lineage for the source to target – an application that serves as the corporate data encyclopedia.

RRP Solutions conducted a feasibility study for streamlining data sources and extract processes to improve efficiency and reduce redundancy. RRP Solutions also researched the applicability of underutilized data marts to current business needs and provided alternative solutions for reducing the gap. Additionally, the firm performed a study on the client’s reporting strategy by interviewing various user groups and evaluating various reporting tools, then provided the client with recommended improvements.

RRP Solutions implemented a PVCS software configuration management tool to ensure version control, as well as implementing a Team Track tool for task management. RRP Solutions delivers bi-monthly status reports and monthly performance measurement plans to the OCC. The bi-monthly status reports provide a detailed look at project progress for the past bi-monthly period. The performance measurement plans provide the OCC with the metric values for reported criteria such as process, customer satisfaction, scheduling and product metrics.

Methodologies for all data management activities follow the OCC’s System Development Life Cycle Methodology and CMMI processes. RRP Solutions promotes a full lifecycle approach, from initial data analysis to database design and script development, through testing and implementation. Test results are documented and checklists are used as a final Quality Assurance tool before turnover for customer testing.

RRP Solutions assisted in Enterprise Data Governance, Metadata Management and Master Data Management. Specific responsibilities include project management and planning, requirements definition and analysis, database and application design, development and testing, data staging (in/out), training, implementation and O&M (Operations & Maintenance).

RRP Solutions also develops new Data Marts and Reports, such as General Ledger Data Mart and CE Scorecard, to support the growing business needs of the OCC. Data sources include IDMS via DARS middleware, MS Access, SharePoint lists, Microsoft Excel, XML, SQL Server and LAN ASCII and Mainframe TSO flat files. RRP Solutions conducts routine data validations to ensure the stability of the production environment.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) uses data warehouse technology to support its internal requirements for human resources management analysis and reporting, and is piloting its use for financial management. The FTC had identified gaps in its capabilities for analysis and reporting for mission-centric data that the client planned to address with data warehouse technology, through development of the Mission-Centric Data Warehouse (MCDW).

The FTC internally maintains a portfolio of mission-related systems. These systems all contain information related to matters of interest to the FTC. The FTC uses the term “matter” to refer to the investigations, litigation, compliance and enforcement activities that it pursues in fulfillment of its mission. Because “matter” is also the fundamental construct it uses to link activities performed to staff and funding, it had extended the concept to include work performed by supporting administrative functions as well. All FTC systems that use the construct of the matter to organize FTC activities and resources will provide information to the MCDW.

In this project for the FTC, RRP Solutions performed various activities involving data warehouse development, including business requirement collection; proposed the solution that met business requirements; designed and built the data warehouse; created dashboards and reports.

The data warehouse development activities included conducting interviews with the business users in order to transform the business requirements into technical and reporting requirements; identifying the conversion rules that met business needs; designing the data marts; identifying the best data integration techniques for the environment; integrating all necessary data in the MCDW. RRP Solutions conducts routine data validations to ensure the stability of the production environment.

RRP Solutions supported all the business users to utilize the business intelligence reports, enhance the reports and manage the dashboards.

Additionally, RRP Solutions performed project management activities such as project planning, monitoring the project progress, project scheduling and project resource planning.

Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA)

RRP Solutions provided Database Administration for the entire project for the Department of State (DOS), Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA).

RRP Solutions provided the services of solution provider, database architect, database engineer and database administrator. RRP Solutions was tasked with performance upgrading, performance optimization and job scheduling, creation of a security model for over two thousand (2,000) users/applications, implementation of backup/recovery systems, disaster mitigation and maintenance of the existing database system.

As this project was a software upgrade and maintenance initiative, RRP Solutions utilized the traditional SDLC Waterfall methodology model, which involves System Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Maintenance. RRP Solutions conducted daily meetings and used project management tools to track the progress.

RRP Solutions implemented Single Sign-On with Oracle LDAP, which saved both administrative and user support costs, while providing a central and secure authorization and authentication framework. RRP Solutions architected Oracle to work on a virtualized environment supported by Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

RRP Solutions primarily utilized Microsoft and Oracle based tools for both the client and server systems. The computers were based on Intel Multi-Core running Microsoft Operating Systems. The internetworking devices were hubs, switches and a router based on Cisco technology.