Paving the Way to Efficiency

It's no mystery--at the State of Illinois Department of Transportation, a SAS Data Warehouse called MISTIC is helping pave the way to better business decisions and an improved highway system.

The Department's test information group, responsible for maintaining labs and facilities for testing road building materials and developing new product specifications, is playing a crucial role in the process. The group collects data from various types of tests, analyzes it, and then uses it to make decisions about specification development, problem solving, determining whether materials are acceptable for incorporation into a project, and quality control.

According to Dave Wheat, Manager of the Test Information Group, there was a wealth of data, but it was not easily accessible before the development of the data warehouse. "Our large IMS (MISTIC system) databases have been very efficient and reliable," explains Wheat, "but they do not provide the ability to look at data and view it from different perspectives."

"We recognized the need for some way of analyzing data to address our quality control specifications," he continues. "It became obvious that we needed a data warehouse to accomplish this and to enable individuals to use that data to help them in their decision making processes."

Using SAS software, the group developed a MISTIC (Materials Integrated System for Testing Information and Communication) data warehouse. The warehouse uses online views, reports, and graphs to provide easy access to departmental test data via user menus defined by major material categories such as aggregate, cement, and concrete. Menus of producers and products, test records, mixture designs, contracts, and assignments are also available through the application.

According to Wheat, SAS software was chosen for the warehouse because of its analytical power and portability. "SAS is able to respond to real-world questions. No matter how many twists and turns there are, the SAS data warehouse enables our users to access the data they need to make decisions," says Wheat. "SAS answers all of our questions and it never lets us down."

Wheat has also been impressed by the way it handles data integrity. "From time to time an engineer has challenged the results of SAS software, but when the dust settles and the follow-up analysis is done, SAS is always right.

"The impact of data warehousing on our group has been very positive, and we no longer have a backlog of user requests," adds Wheat. "We can now spend our time enhancing the warehouse and developing new tools so users can obtain their own answers when they need them.

"With SAS software, we are literally able to do hundreds and hundreds of queries for less money. As opposed to the past, users now have the capability to generate queries, graphs, and statistics and perform their own analyses--the difference is like night and day."

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