Making an Impact on FedEx Business Analytics
Updated November 28, 2018

Making an Impact on FedEx Business Analytics

Jeremy Patag | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO BusinessWorks

We use TIBCO BusinessWorks here at FedEx for enterprise monitoring and reporting of historical and real-time business performance. That statement accurately represents the BW usage in my immediate group. Other teams in my department (FedEx Services) use BW to provide services to other applications across the enterprise. Expounding on its use in my group, BW realizes our business rules. The first application I used it for, as an example, examined 13 months of raw, historical shipment data from a TeraData database. Hovering in the billions of rows worth of data, handing it straight to Spotfire was a moot point. This is where I used BW to apply business rules on and continuously aggregate the data into more condensed, meaningful Oracle tables.
  • BusinessWorks' greatest, obvious strength (to me) is the development process of, essentially, creating UML-diagram-looking processes that actually serve as your code/implementation as well.
  • Another great strength of BusinessWorks is its ability to integrate well with custom Java code or libraries. This adds tremendous amounts of flexibility to what BusinessWorks can accomplish for your application.
  • In 5.x, the test mode becomes unresponsive at times. I don't really have details on this issue, but I'm quite certain it is memory related.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
I was able to use the product effectively and take a couple projects from planning to production because of the training I've received.
  • Used for improving data aggregation in older systems:
  • Summary handling implemented in BusinessWorks generates over 50% less rows than legacy system. Spot check showed 6.75m rows in legacy system. Equivalent data is represented in system using BusinessWorks with 3.25m rows.
  • Great tool for implementing JMS receivers. Some notes from my last project:
  • JMS Receivers – main application, which includes all business logic to process back-end CRS data from EIT JMS queues
  • § uses only 3 receivers (maximum of 6 JDBC connections) per instance. there are 12 instances of the core CRS application–one for each CRS queue. the number of receivers was selected based on the rough amount of connections a database client should be making (according to James G.) of 75. At 6 maximum connections per instance, we have a total maximum of 72 connections for all instances at any given point.
  • exceeds the required minimum consumption rate for peak hours. observed processing rate of over 250,000 events/minute or over 4,000 events/second
If I had to rate the level of efficiency BusinessWorks has provided on a scale of 1-10, I'd give it an 8. It has really made the workflow of getting an application from concept to implementation a breeze. The missing points are due to how cumbersome it is to fill-in certain input fields. A paste/import option in these cases would be ideal.
I haven't really used any other integration products that facilitate data mapping between endpoints, so I can't speak much to this.
Level of difficulty is not difficult at all. I like how tests are just as easy to stand-up as the processes themselves.
I would recommend BusinessWorks if simple, rapid development is needed. A great example would be a quick job that needs to be run on a schedule.

I would not use BusinessWorks for creating a web application.

Using TIBCO BusinessWorks

200 - A number of facets of the FedEx workflow from historical performance reporting to real-time analysis. BusinessWorks is versatile enough to fill a projects needs quickly, where traditional development may take much longer.
10 - The people who are best able to support TIBCO BusinessWorks have to be patient and understanding, as the learning curve proves to be a bit steep for someone unfamiliar with the software. These people must also be proficient in Java and understanding what's going on under the hood at all times. It really helps when trying to help debug applications for your peers.
  • ETL processes.
  • Medium applications that need to interface with more than a handful of external services and/or resources.
  • Small, quick applications that perform simple tasks.
Nothing is perfect. Also, being heavily reliant on any one product is not ideal.