Datawarehousing Solution - Enhance the quality of corporate marketing and sales analysis.
Customer
Our client is a leading manufacturer and distributor of a diversified portfolio of well-known market leading consumer and personal care products. The company earns millions of dollars in revenues worldwide and has a strong presence in major geographies across the globe, employing hundreds of people and including key sales and marketing functions.
Requirement
Client's Products sought to upgrade its marketing and sales infrastructure in order to boost efficiency and increase company's responsiveness to clients' needs. Management recognized the need to enhance the quality of marketing and sales analysis. It became clear that the company needed a powerful solution that would improve data management and maximize the utility of the available information.
One of the major challenges lied in integrating new information systems with the legacy system that housed most of the important sales data.
The issues to be tackled included:
- Improving availability of information in the company
- Enabling retrieval of detailed information and relevant reports
- Handling on-line queries into the legacy sales system
- Organizing data within the legacy system to enable traditional query tools to access the database
Solutions
To address its growing business needs, Client chose to create a data warehouse. The ideal solution had to be simple, effective and reliable. Moreover, it had to deliver data in an easy-to-use format, yet preserve the data breadth required in complex analysis. IBC built a state-of-the-art data warehouse by developing a proprietary data extraction and cleansing application.
The solution simplified data management via the following features:
- Late at night, the application extracts the daily data from the legacy system.
- The data passes through a cleansing cycle where it is "scrubbed" according to an intricate set of business rules
- The data is loaded into the OLAP engine and is available next morning for the employees to use in their decision-making processes
Data that now can be captured from the legacy system includes vital sales, returns, pricing, forecasts, budgets, promotions and cost information. Thanks to IBC, it has become accessible and useable for a multitude of analytical processes.
Major Achievements
The Client immediately witnessed increasing efficiency and improvement of the infrastructure
- Marketing obtained the tools necessary to prepare strong forecasts
- Sales became more receptive to clients' needs, armed with tools for leading edge category management and account reviews
- Senior management can drill down on any specific issue, looking at the overall business, right down to the lower-level detail
- Employees were able to quickly learn the usage of the front-end tools and are now big fans of PowerPlayT, one of the enabling components in the solution
- The solution eliminated the need for printing and circulating hundreds of daily reports
