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Ron Larock
Chief Technology Officer
Cadillac Fairview

Cadillac Fairview is one of North America's largest investors, owners and managers of commercial real estate.  An enthusiastic desire to understand and meet the needs of their retail and office tenants drives the Cadillac Fairview team to create exciting shopping venues and professional hassle-free office environments.

Cadillac Fairview has been at the forefront in the use of Business Intelligence (BI) in the Canadian Property Management Industry, pioneering its use in this industry since 1996. Cadillac Fairview uses BI to analyze and understand their Accounts Receivable, Sales and Leasing Activity.

After a decade of being on a competitor’s BI platform, Cadillac Fairview decided to migrate to Microsoft’s SQL Server’s Analysis Services platform. As a result of this migration, Cadillac Fairview discovered performance issues. For the most part, their BI system was doing what it was intended to do; it was calculating correctly and presenting the appropriate information.  But it was doing so in an unacceptable amount of time. In fact, some of the more complicated queries were taking up over 5 minutes to process.

Cadillac Fairview consulted with GHI Technologies regarding the response time and general performance of their BI system. GHI was subsequently hired to re-architect the system’s “data containers” (Microsoft OLAP cubes) to streamline the queries defined by the existing BI solution.

All cubes are not created equally. GHI’s team analyzed meta data structures and restructured those they identified as the causes of the unacceptable performance. Furthermore, GHI isolated problematic MDX coding that was further complicating the issue. They were able to research and repair both structure and MDX coding logic with the objective of presenting pro-aggregated data results in a much more efficient and effective manner. So efficient in fact that query response time went from over 5 minutes (for the most complicated query) to 5 seconds.

GHI completed this diagnostic and repair service on time and within budget.