ORIX Reports Vehicle Fleet Carbon Emissions with Help from Dataweave

Dataweave (www.dataweave.com.au), an IT consultancy which specialises in enterprise applications and Oracle solutions, has successfully deployed a solution to increase transaction and reporting performance, as well as implementing a disaster recovery solution for ORIX Australia.

ORIX Australia (www.orix.com.au) is a market leader in fleet leasing, management and vehicle rental. Established in Australia in 1986, its head office is located in Sydney, with offices located in most major cities of Australia and New Zealand. ORIX Australia currently employs more than 220 staff, and owns or manages assets in excess of $1 billion.

Raymond Beddie, Infrastructure Manager for ORIX Australia commented, “Our business handles vehicle and equipment leases for thousands of clients, so we need to be able to rapidly respond to customer inquiries, as well as process large volumes of monthly transactions. A few years ago our key business application was experiencing performance problems, leading to a stream of user complaints and frustrations. Our business was being held back, and we struggled to deliver new capabilities without creating unacceptable slowdown of the entire system. We quickly realised that hardware upgrades could only address part of the problem, and turned to Dataweave for help.”

After a business reorganisation in 2006, ORIX Australia decided to rationalise their IT systems and improve transaction performance for critical systems. Dataweave was initially engaged to provide performance tuning advice for the Oracle database platforms underpinning key IT systems used by ORIX Australia.

Dataweave provides ORIX Australia with 24/7 remotely managed support and performance tuning services for the Oracle database and application server infrastructure which underpins ORIX Australia’s business applications. During the initial stages of the project, Dataweave successfully corrected several serious performance problems, allowing ORIX Australia to dramatically improve transaction performance, and delay expensive hardware upgrades.

Raymond Beddie explained, “We used to employ two database administrators on a full time basis, and our users continually complained about poor application response times. Dataweave were able to quickly correct performance issues that had been a thorn in our side for years, and have improved the reliability of our critical applications.”

In 2010, further expansion of the business meant that a new server hardware platform was required to support transaction growth. Dataweave planned the migration of the key database to a Linux based Dell server platform, providing software licence optimisation, migration project planning, disaster recovery planning, and performance tuning for the solution.

A sophisticated disaster recovery solution was implemented with automatic data backup to an offsite co-location datacentre via a private WAN. Business critical data is transmitted automatically to the offsite datacentre every 15 minutes, with less valuable data backed up daily to storage media and stored offsite. Transaction level information is backed up separately, allowing restoration of data to a transaction level in the event of a major outage. Full scale disaster recovery exercises are carried out on a regular basis, to ensure systems can be correctly restored, and improve team member preparedness. All critical software systems are monitored remotely 24/7 by Dataweave.

Raymond Beddie explained, “Our old backup solution used to operate once per day in the evening, and we couldn’t process transactions at the same time. To reduce our risk, and allow us to process information 24/7, Dataweave devised a disaster recovery solution to backup our live data every 15 minutes. The disaster recovery solution paid for itself in a single outage, when we suffered a major hardware failure in February 2011. Dataweave helped us to rapidly switch our entire operation to run from our disaster recovery site, with only a few minutes of transactions needing to be rekeyed.”

Improvements achieved in transaction performance have allowed ORIX Australia to deliver higher levels of user satisfaction, and extend the reporting and online customer service capabilities of their key systems. ORIX Australia is now able to automatically generate complex reports for clients, and make them available interactively via their website. This has allowed ORIX Australia to launch EnviroMotion, which allows their clients to access sophisticated vehicle carbon footprint reports, with estimates of CO₂ vehicle emissions based on manufacturer specifications, fuel usage, and distance travelled. Exception reports are now produced, to proactively identify ways in which fleet managers can reduce costs, and emissions.

Raymond Beddie concluded, “ORIX Australia has a pretty simple philosophy – we want performance not excuses. Our partnership with Dataweave has exceeded our expectations, and helped my IT team to lift overall business productivity. With Dataweave looking after our databases and key systems, my team can focus on improvements, rather than fighting fires.”

Norman Weaver, Managing Director for Dataweave commented, “The point of disaster recovery planning is to think the unthinkable, and decide what might need to be done to reduce the impact on your business. Smart system design can help protect your data, while simple things like team training and drills can improve preparedness, potentially saving you enormous amounts of downtime and confusion when disaster strikes.”

About Dataweave

Dataweave (www.dataweave.com.au) is an IT consultancy which specialises in enterprise applications and Oracle solutions. Founded in 2006 and an Oracle Gold Partner, Dataweave has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Dataweave has a sister company, DW People, which is a specialist IT resourcing consultancy focusing on enterprise computing positions.

About ORIX

ORIX Australia (www.orix.com.au) is a market leader in fleet leasing, management and vehicle rental. Established in Australia in 1986, its head office is located in Sydney, with offices located in most major cities of Australia and New Zealand. ORIX Australia currently employs more than 220 staff, and owns or manages assets in excess of $1 billion.

ORIX Australia is a wholly owned subsidiary of ORIX Corporation, which was established in Japan in 1964, and is at the forefront of the leasing industry, which it pioneered. ORIX Corporation is publicly listed on the NYSE and Tokyo stock exchange, with a global presence spread across 27 countries, and more than 1400 locations worldwide.