Project Description

Philips Healthcare, a global manufacturer of medical equipment and healthcare products, needed a solution to transport and store massive amounts of data into a new database. Their current systems could not perform fast enough to handle the high velocity and high volume of data and began to create a backlog.

The Challenge

Philips Healthcare, a global manufacturer of medical equipment and healthcare products, needed a solution to transport and store massive amounts of data into a new database. The assembly line for one of their leading products, automated external defibrillators (AEDs), tracks each product as it goes through the manufacturing process, collecting data points that get stored in a data warehouse.

Their existing data collection process was not able to keep up with the growing amount of information and file sizes; however, they needed to store data on each step in the assembly line for each individual product for diagnostic and quality assurance purposes. Their current systems could not perform fast enough to handle the high velocity and high volume of data and began to create a backlog. And to top it all off, the government has regulations and strict guidelines around the ability to quickly and accurately capture the information about the product being manufactured.

The Chateaux team designed a solution to speed up the process of moving the assembly line data to the target database using XML, SQL server, and SSIS technologies. First, the protocol for data movement had to be enhanced. The client was experiencing various issues relating to data export, transformation, and transportation which resulted in corrupted data sets. Moving to an XSL/XML protocol greatly improved quality, while enforcing an “interface” from the assembly line to the import of the data.

Through this process, corrupted data sets were flagged and made visible, enabling a retransmission and upholding data quality standards. In the next phase, certain features of SSIS and SQL Server were leveraged to improve the performance and quality of the data warehouse import processes. Both of these technologies support the XSL/XML protocol to improve data quality as well as the high performance dataflow functionality, resulting in performance and order of magnitude greater than the previous implementation.

The big data solution enabled Philips to move hundreds of millions of records to the database and gave them easy access to a real-time view of their data. It immediately eliminated the backlog that had been building over the previous months, allowing them to process over 100,000 files per week from a variety of sources, including local and overseas facilities.

The solution also helped to optimize the manufacturing process by dramatically decreasing production timing issues and improving data quality. Chateaux provided remote mentoring support for the solution after the initial engagement was complete to accommodate the needs of the customer.

The solution is pretty amazing; it just runs, and we don’t need to maintain it, which was one of our main goals. Chateaux provided a solid design followed by a successful implementation that met all of our needs and has helped make BI more affordable for us.

Steve Hugh, Project Manager, Supply Chain Group, Philips Healthcare