Because of a 1995 merger of Burlington Northern Inc. and Santa Fe Pacific Corporation, the newly formed Burlington Northern and Santa Fe (BNSF) had to merge two separate data warehouse initiatives into an integrated system that would support the newly combined company and give users one source of consistent data for accurate, fast analysis and more efficient equipment utilization. The solution they chose was to implement a single enterprise data warehouse powered by Teradata.
"We need to have core systems which are industrial-strength, stable and secure," said Bonnie Henn-Pritchard, BNSF's Technology Services Application Team Leader. "We are continuing to develop applications and find ways to get more information and analytics from our transactional systems into the Teradata warehouse in near-real time."
The analytical needs of BNSF's business users played a key role in the selection of the Teradata platform. Users needed the ability to get fast answers to ad-hoc and pre-defined queries from both detailed and summary data.
