Vale Inco's commitment to product stewardship and the environment reflects the ongoing and innovative development of new and safe uses for nickel by society. They have demonstrated a standard of care by doing their best to ensure the health and safety of people and the places where products are made, shipped, used, re-used, recycled and disposed. Vale Inco's product stewardship model is understood as the management of the quality and safety, health and environmental aspects of their products from the shipping gate onward.. Case Study A critical success factor in meeting their global objectives is the extensive utilization of the Vale Inco Global Data Warehouse. This Enterprise Data Warehouse not only provides strategic information but is their corporate financial reporting tool AND a mission critical operational tool operating at a very detailed granular level. When Vale Inco decided to upgrade their mining software and related databases around the world they had anticipated significant changes to their EDW as well. However, after six frustrating months, utilizing the top resources of Oracle and other specialty firms, the EDW still could not be brought on line. This was delaying the implementation of all mining applications, seriously effecting their productivity and year end was just around the corner where shareholder and other financial reporting was going to be needed. Initially BIA was asked to take up the management of all projects except the EDW project in order to allow the Vale Inco team to concentrate 100% of their efforts. It soon became evident however that there was no clear answer as to why the terabytes of data being imported into the EDW was heavily corrupted. After some consideration, BIA proposed that a plan B solution be initiated where none of the existing resources in plan A would be impacted. After a little bit of convincing the IT sponsor agreed to endorse a parallel plan B under the direction of BIA.

The first action BIA undertook was to solicit the opinions of technical experts both in and around the project. The three questions put forward in face to face discussions were; What is your understanding of how the ETL is supposed to work Where do you think the problems lie Who do you believe has the right skills and knowledge to resolve the issues. The results were somewhat disconcerting but very useful. Of all the candidates interviewed, no two people could identify where the problem(s) existed. Even Oracle’s Global support team could not identify where their products were failing and they had been working onsite on this problem for over five months. There was some consensus on how the ETL process was supposed to work but at the detail level again there was disagreement. Finally the technical resources that had the skills to fix the extracts and loads were generally agreed upon but they had never been engaged in the project and were not recognized as relevant to the outcome. The only things lacking to make this project a success were clear leadership, engaging the proper resources and creating an environment where they could be successful (sound familiar?). One of the first things uncovered during team B’s initial work session with BIA was that the strategy employed by the A team was flawed. The tools they had employed were incompatible! It was technically impossible for the team A solution to work and no one even knew it. When we told them they refused to accept it. Team B then proceeded to reengineer the ETL process using proven and existing tools and techniques. With a skeleton staff and a little help from infrastructure, team B built a test server, reconfigured the ETL process and ran a successful first test in just three days. Eleven days later the EDW was fully operational with 100% integrity. “Leading is not about giving the right answer, it’s about finding the best answer” Nosrat Amiri, Director IT