Chevron Canada Limited
Petroleum Product Company uses SQL Server to speed order processing
Posted: March 3, 2002
Chevron Canada Limited prides itself on its efficient refinery, outstanding retail network, as well as its extensive commercial and industrial operations. Of particular importance to the company is its wholesale business, which serves many large companies in British Columbia's resource industry. When it came to invoicing these wholesale customers, it was no easy task. In order to rationalize its business processes, the company deployed SAP Ag's R/3 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. In March 2000, Chevron Canada wanted to provide customers with even more efficient service and consequently turned to a relational database management system based on Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0. When used in conjunction with SAP R/3, this solution is helping the company realize a considerable reduction in the time it spends on administration, allowing the company to focus instead on serving the needs of its valued customers.
Company Overview
Chevron Canada Limited and its predecessor, Standard Oil Company, have been selling petroleum products to customers in British Columbia since 1935. Chevron Canada Limited now employs more than 350 people directly, as well as a further 2,500 employees in its retail and commercial networks. In addition to its well-known service stations, Chevron Canada Limited operates a refinery in Burnaby and a bulk fuel terminal at Hatch Point on Vancouver Island. Its head office is located in Vancouver.
Business Challenge
Wholesale customers are a vital part of Chevron's business. A group that reads like a Who's Who of the British Columbia economy, it includes customers from the forestry, mining, airline and ferry transportation business. And it is database technology that has played an important role in serving these customers. By installing SAP R/3 in 1994, the company had gone a long way towards rationalizing its business processes and making its service to customers more efficient. But Chevron also wanted a database infrastructure that was flexible enough to operate in the company's round-the-clock environment, including the ability to perform recovery and full system backups without the inconvenience of shutting down the day-to-day functions of the database. As well, the company wanted to reduce the amount of administrative responsibilities associated with operating a database. Working with limited human resources, the company wanted its information technology (IT) staff to devote their attention to more important tasks. After four years of using a legacy database solution, Chevron started looking at ways of improving the performance of its transaction processing. The company had to process as much as 100 gigabytes of information during the invoicing process. During the company's busiest period, end-of-month, reducing the time it takes to process wholesale invoices was of particular importance. "During month-end, we need to process even more information," says Edmund Yee, Chevron Canada Limited's manager of the operations group. "Twenty-four hours in a day is not enough time to handle the volume." The company wanted to reduce the amount of time spent on processing invoices -- a measure that would free its IT staff for other duties. When looking for a new transaction processing solution the company wanted to be able to leverage the considerable expertise it had accumulated from working with Microsoft technologies.
 | By standardizing on the SQL Server database platform, we could reduce our total cost of ownership considerably by retaining a technical team with one set of skills to support both an SAP and a non-SAP platform. |  | | Keith Gardiner
Manager of information technology Chevron
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Solution
In March 2000, Chevron Canada made the move to Microsoft. Particularly vital from the company's point of view was the level locking feature of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. According to Yee, if many changes are made to the system, the update process of the database can become backlogged. This, in turn, degrades the performance of the database. The level locking of version 7.0 eliminated that problem and gave Chevron the performance it was looking for in a database solution. During the deployment of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, the IT team experienced no major hitches. Deployment took approximately three weeks and the system went live with 300 named users and a 45-gigabyte database in February. Helping with the installation was RealTech of Seattle, a consultancy firm with expertise in SAP migration. The firm performed the installation of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 over two 48-hour weekends -- a relatively short amount of time considering the amount of data involved. Development and other work were performed on the first weekend, with production occurring on the second weekend. Production was a more complex process involving pre-processing, removal and post processing of the old data, followed by pre and post-processing of the new data to be entered. "The project was completed seamlessly with users not noticing any difference except in terms of speed," says Andre Kemp, regional manager for Real Tech.
Business Benefits
Chevron has been using earlier versions of SQL Server since the early '90s, with all production applications using a Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 database engine, explains Keith Gardiner, Chevron Canada Limited's manager of information technology. But when a second platform was added to the mix, the cost to retain people to support both platforms increased dramatically. "Because we're a fairly small organization, it was too expensive for us to train people on both platforms," says Gardiner. "By standardizing on the Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 database platform, we could reduce our total cost of ownership considerably by retaining a technical team with one set of skills to support both an SAP and a non-SAP platform." By switching to SQL Server 7.0, Chevron Canada reaped significant benefits in terms of database performance. According to Yee processes that in the past took four to five hours can now be accomplished in as little as 20 minutes. On the average, processes have increased seven- to eight-fold, Yee says. Benefits have been reaped in the area of manageability and reliability as well. The database now runs "24-7" with no downtime for recovery or backups. In the past, explains Gardiner, regular system backups involved taking the system offline for two to three hours at a time. "We're running both our financials and our plant maintenance modules on SAP and they need to be available 24 hours a day," says Gardiner. "When we made the switch to Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, we eliminated those nightly backups completely." Administrative tasks have been reduced considerably as well. Chevron now operates as many as 16 SQL servers running tasks that range from processing wholesale systems and data warehousing to smaller systems for other tasks.
Next Steps
Chevron plans to be one of the early adopters of SQL Server 2000. "We're going live with SQL Server 2000 before it ships," Yee says. And all of Chevron's data warehousing projects will be running on SQL Server 2000. "SQL Server 2000 will certainly improve our performance," Yee says. In particular, Yee is looking forward to the multi-instance support, DTS, log shipping and enhanced performance tools found in SQL Server 2000.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies
http://www.chevron.ca
