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| Case Study |
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BI Infrastructure assessment for leading home
appliances manufacturer
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BI Infrastructure assessment for leading home
appliances manufacturer
The Client
The client is one of the largest
producers of home appliances
in the world. More than 55
million products of the
company are sold every year in
over 150 countries across the
world.
The Challenge
To strengthen its competitive position in the marketplace, the client wanted
to improve its ability to forecast demand for its products. While the client had
an existing data warehouse environment, it was not optimally configured for
sales forecasting. Version control was taken care of manually, and changes
made went directly into production.
Lack of data integrity in the data warehouse caused incorrect and duplicate
information to be recorded in the system. An additional level of complexity
was added due to the fact that there was incomplete documentation of the
existing BI infrastructure in the organization. This hampered the maintenance
and support activities of the data warehouse. Further, multiple ETL tools were
being used with inadequate testing and development environment. To address
these issues and streamline its business intelligence infrastructure, the client
decided to partner with Patni.
The Solution
Patni understood the client's business objectives and assisted the latter to create a
detailed roadmap for achieving the stated goals. Patni used its Business Intelligence
development roadmap based on IIDM (Interactive and Iterative development
methodology) to address the key issues faced by the client.
Starting off with requirements gathering, Patni assisted the client in design validation,
identifying data integrity issues, defining data elements and testing the system to ensure
that the deployed system met key business requirements. A detailed assessment of the
existing information infrastructure was conducted, and documentation of the existing
business processes followed with respect to the data warehouse was done by Patni. AS-IS
process maps were created, gaps were analyzed, and TO-BE process maps were
recommended. The system architecture was designed as per Cognos standards. Using this
architecture, performance could be enhanced by adding load balancing servers if the load
on the existing servers increased. Subsequently, Patni enhanced the sales forecasting
solution on Cognos Planning.
The Technology
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Operating System:
Windows 2000 Advanced
Server |
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OLAP/Reporting Servers:
Cognos PowerPlay
Enterprise Server |
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ETL tools: Decision
Stream 7.1, Microsoft DTS
2000 |
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Connectivity Software:
DB2 Connect, ODBC, FTP
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Database: MS SQL Server
2000 |
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Scheduling: NT Task
Scheduler, Cognos
DecisionStream,
Command Batch
scripts |
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Client Software
- Reporting Tool:
Impromptu 7.3,
Cognos Enterprise
Planning (Analyst &
Manager)
— OLAP Tool: Cognos
PowerPlay 7.3. |
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The Benefits
Patni's solution enabled the client to establish the foundation for a
streamlined business intelligence infrastructure. Some significant
benefits include:
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Improved forecasting capability |
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Standardized processes that helped in maintaining data integrity
and quality |
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Significant cost savings due to offshore leverage |
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Improved maintenance and support due to extensive
documentation |
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