The Business Situation:
An established security software company was facing the dilemma of reconciling sales data from its engineering maintained e-commerce systems with billing data from it’s Oracle ERP system. Tribal knowledge on the tie in and hand offs from engineering systems to the ERP system was lost with staff turnover due to multiple rounds of acquisitions and divestures.

The key problems that needed to be solved were:
1. Reconciliation of Booked, Billed and Backlogged numbers between engineering data systems and Oracle ERP system
2. Installed base calculation for reporting to wall street
3. Renewals information to drive revenue

What was done:
Raw data from the engineering systems and billing data from the ERP system was extracted.  Data cleansing and data profiling was performed to enable smoother data integration. Data was then loaded into a temporary data warehouse to enable in-depth historical data analysis.

Data analysis showed that engineering systems generated an inordinate amount of security software. This finding in turn raised fears that software was being given away for free.

Business Results:
Understanding of the engineering systems platform enabled the finance team to identify the nuances (corner cases) and reconcile their books on a consistent and trusted basis in the history of the company.

Technical Environment:
To facilitate commercialization the following systems were put in place:
CRM System: Siebel, Siebel on Demand (Oracle SaaS version of Siebel CRM system)
Database warehouse Platform: Oracle
Data model: Custom
Data Cleansing: Custom rules
ETL Tools: Informatica, Custom SQL
Customer Data Integration: None

Glossary
Installed Base: Number of software installs

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