- Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI) is a leading helicopter company that transports passengers and provides services to the oil and gas industry. - PHI lacked visibility and real-time data across its 200 global locations due to disparate data sources, leading to delays and inaccurate information. - PHI implemented Ramco DecisionWorks to integrate data from various systems into a centralized data warehouse, providing automated collation and multidimensional reports with KPIs for business users. This enabled improved financial analysis, reduced aircraft downtime, and enhanced marketing and safety analysis.

1. STUDY
CASE
PETROLEUM HELICOPTERS
Company Name: Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI)
Headquarters: Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
Products and Services: 250 leading-edge technology helicopter fleet, offshore oil and
gas, onshore mining, international, aero-medical, and technical service industries
Website: www.phihelico.com

2. OVERVIEW
The economic downturn and escalating fuel prices operated on Oracle platform and updated
together have had a profound effect on the transactional data across locations. PHI collated
business aircraft markets. Business and general transactional information through structured data
aviation aircraft production dropped by 40% in sources, as well as MS Excel. But it did not have
2010 and the industry, dependent on consumer access to data, not just any data but important,
spending power and fuel costs to main profitability, decision-making analytical data. Being a
experienced a serious setback. For avionics methodical and professional company, PHI’s
manufacturers globally, the slump has been an eye- managers spent excruciating hours extracting
opener. They realized that slumps, economic information.
downturns, escalating fuel prices are factors
beyond their control, but what is within their control Spanning the entire Gulf Coast region, PHI’s
is their own respective organizations and playing it passenger list is over 1,000,000 a year. It flies its
smart would mean that their internal productivity helicopters under various conditions and over
always remained at peak performance. Also, they varied lengths of time. Service to major producers
accepted the fact that their business vision was and independents in the domestic offshore oil and
dependent on business intelligence which often gas industry continues to be the largest segment of
was not available and whenever it was it was not their operation. While there have been massive
completely dependable. changes in the oil and gas industry, particularly in
the offshore environment, PHI have sustained their
long time leadership position by helping customers
achieve maximum efficiency and productivity–
BUMPY RIDE essential components of success in an
environment where exploration, drilling, and
For Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI),
production take place at greater depths each year.
headquartered at Lafayette in Louisiana, USA, one
of the world’s leading helicopter companies known A new level of co-operation between companies
for safe and reliable helicopter transportation, operating in this environment had allowed PHI to
realisation that technology could make a difference become more than a service provider. Alliances
happened when it saw that each of its 200 bases had been formed in which they supported
worldwide behaved like independent entities, customer goals and objectives by providing
creating information silos. Not anywhere as smooth value-added services that were unique in the
as its fleet of Bell and Sikorsky helicopters, PHI’s commercial helicopter industry.
voluminous data resided in disparate data sources.
Its IT department spent most of its time in data PHI was growing into a leader in support of
extraction and the PHI managers struggled to come deepwater oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of
to terms with information which was either Mexico, serving installations more than 200 miles
inaccurate or delayed. offshore in nearly 10,000 feet of water. PHI’s hangar
facilities were responsible for planning maintenance
PHI is a big name in the commercial helicopters activities on aircraft, by monitoring consumption
business. Its fleet of more than 275 Bell and parameters on different components fitted on the
Sikorsky helicopters span the skies working for aircraft. These maintenance activities were executed
offshore oil, onshore mining, scientific expedition, as projects and were termed hangar visits. PHI
aero-medical and technical service companies. It monitored these projects closely, to ensure that
has an impeccable reputation as the world’s top there were no delays in the release of the aircraft for
commercial operator. This title is well deserved as normal operations. The field bases performed
PHI is equipped with best-of-class pilots, routine inspections on aircrafts assigned to bases,
technicians and premier maintenance facilities. to ensure that aircrafts were not grounded during
However, PHI was experiencing its own issues. normal flying hours, which would result in a loss of
PHI had in place systems like Lawson Financials & revenue. The Materials department was responsible
Payroll and Ramco Aviation to manage its for procurement of parts for the planned hangar
transactional requirements. These systems visits. In addition, it was responsible for shipment of

3. parts to field bases, based on requests, to ensure multiple scorecards, to take a quick view of the
that Aircraft on Ground (AOG) situations did not performance of an organization and navigate
occur. Working in silos, each function behaved in a into details from the dashboard. This can be
disintegrated way and this made analysis a daunting configured in a Balanced Scorecard framework
task. The company needed information and it and/or the Closed Loop Planning & Control
needed it in real time. framework (Management by Objectives/Goal
Hierarchy) for Strategic, Tactical and
Operational Performance Management
RAMCO ON THE RADAR • Analytical Workflow provided for the automation
of any Analytical Business Process, for flow of
PHI turned to Ramco to provide them with one
Information/Tasks
consolidated, single solution that would integrate
their global operations and provide them with • Planning & Budgeting application provided an
accurate business information based on which they Excel interface for Planning, with additional
could make intelligent decisions. algorithms available as Excel add-ins.
Ramco DecisionWorks, a comprehensive Corporate At PHI, Ramco DecisionWorks enabled collation of
Performance Management solution, forms part of data from diverse systems into a central repository.
the Ramco Enterprise Series packaged solutions. This allowed for continuous access to up-to date
It is a powerful combine for Corporate Performance information and enabled them to look across
Management, with applications of Business locations to do trending and data analysis.
Integrator, Business Decisions, Analytical Workflow
and Planning & Budgeting. The first benefit derived from the solution was
Financial Analysis.
Business Integrator performs the functions of ETL
(Extract Transform Load). It facilitates smooth With Ramco DecisionWorks, PHI could now
collation of data from multiple transactional automatically calculate ROCE (Return Of Capital
sources (ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.) and their Employed) as a key performance indicator. This
transformation into Data Marts/Data Warehouse, calculation was done based on ratio from EBITDA
for further analysis and decision-making. At PHI, to Capital Employed at an aggregate level. Further
Business Integrator designed and constructed the analysis on ROCE was enabled by providing a
Data Warehouse using various transactional data multidimensional report, with a drill down on the
sources like Lawson Financial, Ramco Aviation different components of ROCE.
solution, etc.
Along with ROCE, PHI could now do a DOC (Direct
Business Decisions provided the following Operating Costs) and a Direct Maintenance Costs
objective specific information and actionable Analysis. For this analysis, transactional
processes: information was extracted from the Lawson
Activities module and serve as the aggregated
• Metrics or Key Performance Indicators to costs under various account categories. This data
measure the performance of various facets of was then uploaded into the DecisionWorks
the goal (Performance Management) database server, to generate a drill down report on
the Operating and Maintenance Costs, for the
• Relevant reports, drill downs and cubes to
respective model of aircrafts used. A report on the
summarize/analyze the objective along with
Direct Operating Costs per flight hour for different
multiple dimensions (Business Intelligence)
models of aircraft was also generated.
• Business rules to monitor critical events and
PHI often had to deal with AOG or `Aircraft On
initiate alerts/workflow for the given objective
Ground’ situation. This is a situation which occurs
(Event Management)
when an aircraft does not meet regulatory
• Configure Personal–Business Dashboards with requirements and is found unfit for flight. AOGs can

4. be due to various reasons such as shortage of Ramco DecisionWorks that helped understand
material, skills, lack of adequate time, lack of trends, for the different KPIs and the impact of the
maintenance facilities, improper material planning, proactive efforts in reducing the number of
unexpected maintenance events, accidents and so incidents, accidents or occurrences.
on. PHI wanted to identify the reasons for AOGs, in
order to take action and reduce Aircraft on Ground Multidimensional reports that help in analyzing the
occurrences. To aid PHI managers in AOG current service levels for the customers were
Analysis, Aircraft on Ground situations are configured for the Operations department. PHI
configured as KPIs and a detailed report with drill reports included Contract / Aircraft Availability
down on various dimensions like ATA and Report, Replacement Event Report, etc. The
occurrences was provided. analysis was further supplemented by KPIs like
Aircraft Availability Rate, Contract Availability Rate,
The key objectives of analysis for the Materials etc.
function area were:
The data that PHI’s Marketing department required
• Increase the Stock Turn Rate for analysis was extracted from multiple sources.
Information on customer details was extracted from
• Increase service levels by satisfying requests McMobile contact management software. Details
within the specified date of marketing revenue were extracted from Lawson
application while sales call details from Excel
• Improve accuracy by reducing the value of
spreadsheets. Multidimensional reports on
inventory and repeat adjustment of parts
Customer Profitability Analysis were configured
• Enhance the vendor performance along with KPIs like number of shelf customers,
number of ferry flights, etc. The reports and
To achieve these objectives, data was extracted KPIs configured for all the functional areas
from Ramco Aviation, with predefined logic and were rendered in a Goal Hierarchy framework,
KPIs configured along with reports like: for Performance Management, in Ramco
DecisionWorks.
1. Repeated parts requested report
2. Repeated parts adjustment report
3. Non-moving parts report
SUMMARY
• Automation of the data collation and validation
4. Vendor performance report
process, resulted in little manual interference,
The objectives of the Safety Analysis were twofold: thereby increasing time for analysis
1. To reduce risks associated with business • Reduction of PHI’s dependence on the IT
operations, by analyzing the causes for department for their analytical purposes
incidents and occurrences.
• Multidimensional analytical reports, with drill
2. Improve safety awareness among PHI downs and KPIs, for business users, based on their
employees through proactive initiatives. span of control
The data sources included both Ramco Aviation • Provision of Visual Performance Indicators and
Solution and Excel spreadsheets, which captured Personalisable Dashboard for the users
information on proactive measures taken. Standard
measures like Total Preventable Occurrences Rate
(TPOR), Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) and
Total Flight Accident Rate (TFAR) were used by the
departments to monitor the effort rates in PHI.
Multidimensional reports were configured in

5. QUICK FACTS ACKGROUND
RB
OME
ST
CU
• Presence in 43 countries
• Revenue: growing at a five-year
CAGR of over 42%
• Services to the offshore oil and
gas, onshore mining, international,
aero-medical, and technical
service industries
• Product range: 250 leading-edge
HTS technology helicopter fleet
LIG
GH
HI
• No manual intervention
• No time delay
• User can view the latest data CHALLEN
GE
S
from his/her desktop FA
• Actual sales can be analyzed
CE
vis-à-vis planning
D
• Lack of visibility into its 200
• Role-based security access to the users worldwide operations
• Multiple scenario analysis of sales • Lack of data related to:
possible, enabling managers to • Grounded fleet
plan for the future effectively • Financial information
• Customer behavior
• Sales projections
• Operational hiccups
AMCO D
N–R EC
TIO IS
S LU I
O
SO
T
NW
FI
NE
OR
• Financial Reports
BE
KS
• Automation of the data collation and validation • Aircraft On Ground (AOG)
process, resulted in little manual interference, analysis
thereby increasing time for analysis • Marketing & Sales Analysis
• Reduction of PHI’s dependence on the IT • Financial Analysis
department for their analytical purposes
• Multidimensional analytical reports, with
drill downs and KPIs, for business users,
based on their span of control
• Provision of Visual Performance Indicators and
Personalisable Dashboard for the users

6. Global office locations:
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Lawrenceville, NJ 08648
Tel: +1 609 620 4800
Fax: +1 609 620 4860
Toll-free: +1 800 472 6261
e-mail: info@rsc.ramco.com
South Africa
Canada
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Ramco Systems Canada Inc. No. 5, Walnut Road
World Exchange Plaza 2nd Floor, SmartXchange Building
45, O”Connor St., Suite 1150 PO No. 1228, Durban - 4000
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. K1P 1A4 South Africa
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ASEAN
Europe
Malaysia
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