The Business Situation:
A large multi-national company was grappling with unsold inventory that was fast becoming obsolete and consequently was unsaleable. This in turn meant massive losses due to inventory write offs.   Fortunately the balance sheet was strong so that the company could weather this out.

The business that was solely focused on increasing sales and market share was now having to change its focus and become operations oriented to prevent such losses in the future.

With this change in focus came the needs to have better quality information.

What was done:
An enterprise data warehouse was designed and implemented with an emphasis on:

Customer master data
Product  master data
Vendor master data
Territory master data

To shorten implementation times, governance for Customer master data, Product master data and Territory master data was implemented in subsequent phases. This was done as it was difficult to engage executives and provide sponsorship as they were already buried under new business demands.

By moving data governance to a later phase enabled a higher level of engagement from the business side execs as the lessons learned during implementation provided a framework for the execs to focus on specific issues.

A key business challenge that we helped overcome was determining end of day cut off.  By it self innocuous but very significant at quarter end and year end reporting. where each geography did not want to be in a weaker position by having it’s numbers under reported.

Business Results:
A daily close of books enabled the exec teams to know
Inventory On hand
top 100
bottom 100
Products that have not “moved” in the last 30, 45, 60 days

Enabled sub second reporting of business by
Industry
Geography
LOB

Enabled “what if” analysis for different business scenarios.

Increased turns of inventory
Increased cash flow
Increased executive oversight over the operations.

Increased executive oversight ultimately led to increased profits as each

Technical Environment:
CRM System: none
ERP Billing System: Oracle, SAP, others
Reporting Dashboard: Hyperion, Business Objects, OBIEE
Database Warehouse Platform: Oracle
Data Model: Custom
Data Cleansing: custom
ETL Tools: Custom
Customer Data Integration: Custom
Portal System: none
EDI Platform: none

Glossary:

Contact Us to get answers to your specific Data Challenges and find out how we can help you achieve your business objectives through better data management.