BI Insight

Editor's Note

Systech Corner

Background

In this case study you would see how a leading wholesale drug distribution company achieved improved operational efficiency through Systech’s innovative and cost effective solution and analysis.

The client had to consolidate data from multiple transactional systems into a single enterprise data warehouse. The data consolidation would provide a single view across the entire enterprise and permit Integrated Reporting, Analysis and Decision-making, across the organization. This would provide a single Customer view/definition across the enterprise – eliminating the disconnect in processes such as sales, fulfillment and customer service & satisfaction.

The Challenge in the Details

The client had disparate source systems and multiple decision support systems where data could not be merged or consolidated. These data sources/elements did not map to the definitions in the financial systems either. They were able to generate reports at an invoice level and the reports were taking exceedingly long execution times. The challenges for Systech were:

• To build a single repository for information – integrating data from the disparate systems.
• To design a cost effective solution utilizing the existing hardware and software.
• To deliver within the extremely tight timelines defined by the customer(s).
• To enable flexible & detailed data analysis.
• To implement the front-end application such that it could support existing requirements and possible future developments.
• To provide visibility and insights into costs, revenues, capacity and assets, providing insight into past, present and future information.
• To measure historical performance, profits of incoming orders, initiate trend analysis, predict and optimize costs, profit, capacity; for return on invested capital of your future business.
• To ensure the delivery of undeniably accurate, actionable and widely accessible cost (direct and indirect), resource and capacity information enabling the client to operate more efficiently and in turn reduce cost.

The Solution

At the very beginning, it was determined that the sheer size of the workload combined with the complexity of the organizational and data issues would require a project team with strong leadership & high level executive sponsorship from the client. The tight schedule and budget constraints worked against the traditional approach of organizing a big onsite project team with the resources necessary to accomplish those goals.

Systech team decided to split the project into manageable parts – each of which would be tackled by a small team split into an On-site project lead and an Off-site project team. The Onsite-Offshore teams adopted a fast, responsive and iterative approach to fashion a solution for their part of the puzzle. Iterations of model-build-test-fix-retest resulted in a better componentized build for the Data Warehouse.

Systech teams worked in collaboration with the client to engage, understand the business requirements, craft the technical components and deliver a cost effective analysis for key business areas including:

• CUSTOMER
  • Customer & Channel Profitability
  • Segmentation profitability
  • Sales Optimization
  • Strategic Cross-Sell
• OPERATIONS
  • Distribution Optimization
  • Reducing Operating Expenses
  • Reengineering & Process Redesign
  • Supply Chain Measurement and Optimization
  • Resource & Capacity Planning & Utilization
• PRODUCT
  • Product Profitability
  • Line of Business/Segment
  • SKU Rationalization
  • Brand Analysis
• CORPORATE
  • Corporate Performance Management
  • Business Process Measurement & Analysis
  • Optimized Return on Capital
  • Continuous Improvement Monitoring

Result

• The solution delivered by Systech not only addressed the pain areas but also provided additional benefits to the client.
• Datawarehouse delivered to the client resulted in improved process efficiencies, faster query response times, reduced data load windows, a flexible data model to permit a wide range of analysis.
• Systech’s solution empowered decision makers by allowing them to drill down into their data for detailed analysis.
• Additional types of analysis facilitated by the solution include profitability analysis based on segment, insight into wholesale acquisition cost and better insights of the historical data.
• Forecasting was a key functionality in the delivered solution. This function provided the scoring and tracking tools for business operations.
• Systech helped pinpoint client’s unprofitable products, customers and vendors that might require renegotiation, re-pricing or obsolescence
• Systech’s solution identified profitable products and customers and helped identify opportunities for profit improvement

Featured Article case study, operational efficiency, profit analytics

IT Jobs Are Growing: Where is Business Intelligence?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a fascinating organization, especially if you are a business intelligence (BI) practitioner. A part of the Department of Labor, it is the place where you go to look for labor economics and statistics within the federal government. The BLS not only “collects, processes, analyzes, and disseminates essential statistical data” but it supplies this data the other federal agencies, state and local governments and to the public at large.

Furthermore, periodically the BLS produces and publishes statistics that make businesses blink and the markets shudder. Who is unaware, these days, of the importance of the latest unemployment numbers as reported in the Current Population Survey , or consumer buying statistics as reported in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, or the rate of inflation as reported in the Consumer Price Index. All these, of course, are key deliverables of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Occasionally BLS reports on the state of labor – jobs – in certain industries or parts of the economy. It does this every two years through the publication of the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which includes a lot of information about the type of jobs, working conditions, employment outlook, wage projections, etc. for a large number of occupations. The latest version of the Occupational Outlook Handbook was released in December 2009 and covers the period 2008-2018.

With unemployment near the 10% mark, the Obama Administration has placed substantial emphasis on job creation. This is also politically important given the need to measure the impact of the stimulus package on this all-important indicator of economic growth. As a result, experts have been going over the Handbook with a fine-tooth comb as they look to identify the industries with the highest prospects for job creation. You can imagine that there still is much interest in clean energy and in healthcare.

Yet one of the most remarkable stories that the Handbook data is telling us has to do with the importance that information technology (IT) has had in job creation. What’s more, if you are to believe the BLS, not only have IT jobs grown rapidly in the period observed in the latest Occupational Employment Survey (1999-2008), but it is quite likely that there will be continued robust growth in IT jobs in the decade ahead.

According to the BLS, 688,000 new IT jobs were created between 1999 and 2008. That is an increase of 26% over the previous period. In addition, if you consider that overall employment grew 6.2% during the same period, it means that IT employment grew over four times as fast. Hence, it is important that we continue investing in this area at a healthy clip.

Now, to truly understand what is happening in IT jobs, you must be able to decipher BLS-speak and their interesting occupational classification. IT jobs are included under the major occupational group named “Professional and Related,” which includes architects, engineers, lawyers, social workers, physicians, nurses and the like. This occupational group, by the way, is projected to be the fastest growing major occupational group (17%) and is forecasted to add about 5.2 million new jobs to the economy in the 2008-2018 decade.

The specific category we want to focus on is that called “computer and mathematical science,” which, as mentioned, is projected to add almost 785,700 new jobs as a group. The BLS states that it is expected to grow at over twice the rate of all other occupations. Why? Because “Demand for workers in computer and mathematical occupations will be driven by the continuing need for businesses, government agencies, and other organizations to adopt and utilize the latest technologies.”

So far so good, but what exactly are these professions? The BLS has integrated the following into the “computer and mathematical science” grouping: actuaries, computer network, systems and database administrators, computer scientists, computer software engineers and computer programmers, computer support specialists, computer systems analysts, mathematicians, operations research analysts and statisticians.

Business intelligence practitioners apparently may fall into any one of a combination of these including the operations research analyst or statistician professions. Given the nature of business intelligence, it is quite understandable, but it may be something the emerging BI community may want to ponder at some point in the future.

That said let’s comment on two other aspects of the IT jobs forecast. The first is that apparently the strong showing caught a number of labor analysts by surprise. There seems to have been many who were concerned that the offshoring phenomenon and the tail of the dot-com bubble bursting would have a much more significant impact. While it is clear that some IT jobs have been outsourced overseas, these were somewhat limited to the programming area, where jobs declined 25% in the last ten years. But the tremendous growth in jobs in two other IT occupation types substantially attenuated that decline. First is jobs that require workers to be either on site or close by, such as network administrators and comput¬er support specialists. The other type includes the higher skilled jobs, such as computer engineers or software and application engineers. These, by the way, also happen to be higher paying and hence also accounted for a new increase in average earnings for IT jobs.

Second, where exactly are the new jobs going to be created? Well, “network systems and data communications analysts” as a group are forecasted to be the second fastest growing occupation (53%) in the 2008-2018 period and “computer software engineers, applications” is also in the Top 20 chart with an expected 34% growth rate. But in terms of actual job contribution to the economy, the BLS projects the following from the full roster of IT professions:

It is also important to note that BLS does talk to the fact that the public sector at all levels – federal, state and local governments – will play a role through the establishment of policies that will increase demand for IT jobs. Already in 2008 and 2009, the stimulus package and health reform had a strong influence.

In summary, as we BI practitioners look to the job market as a factor in economic or social analysis, it is important to have a sense of how the IT professions themselves are performing in these times.

This BI Insight news item contains information from an article by Dr. Barquin. Dr. Barquin is the President of Barquin International, a consulting firm, since 1994. He specializes in developing information systems strategies, particularly data warehousing, customer relationship management, business intelligence and knowledge management, for public and private sector enterprises. He has consulted for the U.S. Military, many government agencies and international governments and corporations.

Dr. Barquin is a member of the E-Gov (Electronic Government) Advisory Board, and chair of its knowledge management conference series; member of the Digital Government Institute Advisory Board; and has been the Program Chair for E-Government and Knowledge Management programs at the Brookings Institution. He was also the co-founder and first president of The Data Warehousing Institute, and president of the Computer Ethics Institute. His PhD is from MIT. Dr. Barquin can be reached at rbarquin@barquin.com

Integration of Performance Module for Google AdWords with NetSuite’s Cloud Computing Platform Announced by myDials

myDIALS, a provider of SaaS performance management solutions, recently announced the integration of its myDIALS Performance Module for Google AdWords with the NetSuite cloud computing platform. The myDIALS Performance Module, which measures the effectiveness of AdWords paid search campaigns, is an extension of the myDIALS operational business intelligence solution that was integrated with NetSuite this past April. Built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud development platform, the combined solution helps online marketers see the true ROI of their Google AdWords campaigns by combining performance metrics from NetSuite Ecommerce, CRM, and ERP, with metrics from Google AdWords. This leads to better marketing decisions and can boost Ecommerce sales.

“By combining AdWords metrics with the performance metrics contained in the myDIALS Performance Modules for NetSuite, we’re allowing joint customers to tune their marketing campaigns to deliver higher revenue and profits,” said Wayne Morris, CEO of myDIALS. “Because these myDIALS Performance Modules can be deployed so quickly, the improved ROI of marketing campaigns – and the ROI of operational business intelligence – begin almost immediately.”

The myDIALS Performance Module for Google AdWords lets online marketers deploy in a single day the capability to see and analyze revenue and gross profits from their AdWords paid search campaigns. Results are presented within the NetSuite environment through the tightly integrated myDIALS dashboards. By applying myDIALS analytical capabilities and scenario analysis to the combined metrics, the combined solution helps executives make better business decisions based on more detailed and relevant information.
Working With NetSuite
The myDIALS Performance Module for Google AdWords and the associated myDIALS Connector for Google AdWords can be deployed in a single day to add functionality to the myDIALS Performance Module for NetSuite announced in April. Together, they analyze Google AdWords metrics, along with operational Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The integrated solution extends NetSuite to help companies increase business efficiencies, business performance, and ROI on their marketing campaigns.

“As more companies spend ever greater amounts of money on paid search, it becomes increasingly important that they can determine the true ROI of AdWords marketing campaigns,” said Guido Haarmans, NetSuite’s Vice President Developer Programs. “The combination of myDIALS, NetSuite, and Google AdWords provides the ability to track costs from impression to profit so that AdWords become an integral part of a highly optimized marketing effort.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Informatica Platform Provides Competitive Advantage for Dean Health Plan

Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software, announced that Dean Health Plan, one of the largest and most diversified health maintenance organization (HMO) in the Midwest, has standardized on the Informatica Platform.

Dean Health Plan is implementing a single integrated claims administration system to streamline claims management, adjudication and reporting. The implementation has reduced latency of critical information from a matter of weeks to a day or less. Dean Health Plan now enjoys quicker reaction time, effective claims trends and information requests across a network of more than 2,000 healthcare practitioners, 80 clinic sites and 26 plan hospitals.

After their initial data warehouse deployment in 2001, Dean Health Plan has selected the Informatica Platform as “the solution of choice” for data integration, movement and synchronization.

The Informatica Platform powers the successful, low-risk migration of claims data from a legacy mainframe environment to a modern HIPAA-ready EDS Metavance claims system.

The business benefits for Dean Health Plan include a faster, more efficient process for submitting patient referral requests that has helped enhance practitioner efficiency; reduced administrative costs; and improved patient satisfaction. The IT benefits include increased IT agility in the face of business and regulatory change requests from the government for new types of information within frequently tight timeframes. The Informatica Platform also enables the company to respond quickly and cost-effectively to requests through the extensive use of reusability and automation built into the Informatica Platform.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Industry News

Editor's Note

Background

Nationwide Financial Services, Inc., (NFS) together with its subsidiaries, provides long-term savings and retirement products in the United States. The company operates in three segments: Individual Investments, Retirement Plans, and Individual Protection offering a variety of investment products including annuity products, income products, and investment advisory services and investment life insurance products. All three segments were run on the Teradata platform.

NFS seeked a solution that helped them compete in a shifting global market, and to ensure that the IT infrastructure was as cost effective and as operationally efficient as possible on a long run.

Systech was selected for the conversion project to migrate the Data Warehouse platform from the existing Teradata platform to the newly acquired Netezza Data Warehouse appliance, to leverage a proven, functionally rich technology. The project involved moving the data itself as well as “re-wiring” all Data integration, reporting, application interfaces and any other systems which touched the existing data warehouse.

Challenges

• The complexity of multiple data source systems and identifying all components of an alternate solution that require design change due to conversion and identifying the impact of those changes
• Incomplete documentation in existing processes such as data load, reporting and interface processes
• In-flight project management (Keeping development going on existing infrastructure while converting and managing the integration process)
• Database “re-modeling” and having to isolate and confirm data Model re-usability and potential issues
• Confirm Re-usability of existing approach and/or alternate strategy
• Ability to generate a balanced test plan that meets critical test criteria in allotted budget and service hours available
• Testing in this project represents a major and complex element as the end result of the project interconnects so many technologies, addresses a significant amount of data across the organization and impacts a wide group of end users

Solution

Systech executed a managed conversion scope of the entire Nationwide Financial Data Warehouse environment. The financial data is now stored in a staging area and in various data marts. The migration of “ETL” which constitutes the application code and processes moves the data on an ongoing basis into the data warehouse and various data marts. The migration of the connected reporting environments and applications interfaces to the data warehouse.

The change of database platform from Teradata and Netezza has impacts on the physical structures of the database schema, ranging from naming standards, column data types and object functionality such as writing into a table through a view. The design took into account all such factors in arriving at an alternate schema design that would be completely supported by Netezza and at the same time provide the exact same functionality as the current Teradata environment.

The processes that perform data movement across the systems use Teradata specific functionality to perform bulk loads, faster exports or some specific data transformations. A host of such functions and functionalities were identified as part of design phase and an alternate solution was designed to provide the exact same functionality in the new Netezza environment.

The reporting applications interact with the Teradata environment through a series of reporting tools and technology. The interaction of these tools with the Teradata environment happens in a number of ways, some tools offer semantic layers to mask the underlying database schema with a business definition, As far as reporting applications are concerned the two major design factors that were implemented are Netezza specific functions used and Connectivity mechanism.

Results & Benefits

Systech’s Success at NFS was implementing cost savings and performance improvement. Reporting performance improvement in Business Objects was substantially a 65% reduction in processing time. Systech completed a seamless database backup to the Netezza DR database. Systech went in with a very complete approach and methodology around conversion that managed a very complex scope. The attitude and teamwork displayed contributed to the team’s accomplishment to enhance the current reporting capabilities and greatly enhances NFS’s ability to achieve competitive advantage through actionable data analytics going forward.

Despite disruptions for many reasons, the Systech dedication and project management really was apparent. The teams worked incredible hours to make deadlines and complete the project. Systech’s assistance with organizing the numerous technical challenges and helping NFS keep track of backup copy of data for comparison. We accomplished an amazing amount of tedious testing through teamwork.

“This was a very challenging project which required an enormous amount of collaboration across business units, technical disciplines and our vendor partners. The attitude and teamwork displayed by Systech was awesome. Their accomplishment not only enhances our current reporting capabilities, but even more importantly, greatly enhances Nationwide Finance’s ability to achieve competitive advantage through actionable data analytics going forward.” -Tim Lyons, Vice President, NF – Business Solution Services, Nationwide Financial Services

Systech Corner cost efficient, database migration, insuarance, Netezza Migration, Performance improvement

Featured Article change management, controlled change, platform migration

Information Builders and Systech Announce

New York, NY – Month, Day, 2010 – Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today reiterated that it has partnered with Systech Solutions, Inc. to strengthen the ability to help customers extend their overall BI and Analytics capabilities on the Information Builders platform.

The partnership will allow small-to-medium and mid-market businesses (SMB) in the West, Southwest and Mid west regions gain a competitive edge while getting the most value out of IT investments.

“Over the last few years, we have seen significant shifts in the expectations of end users and their relationship with enterprise software,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO, Information Builders. “We provide an integrated solution that allows customers a completely integrated solution for gaining timely and trusted information to achieve positive business outcomes.  Systech Solutions, Inc. allows the use of unified business intelligence to help companies address their biggest challenges, and make use of business opportunities.

The best-of-breed combination of Information Builders software and Systech’s expertise in custom solutions for the media and entertainment, CPG & retail, gaming, hospitality, and financial services is expected to make a powerful offering in the SMB market.

Working with Systech will not only help provide millions of Information Builders users around the world an ideal BI fit for unique business models, but will also help leverage Systech’s offshore development center for cost effective and speedy implementations.

As an Information Builders’ partner, Systech will be the go-to partner in offering consulting and implementation teams. Information Builders will train and certify technical and sales staff at Systech and provide ongoing technical support to ensure an ideal customer experience. In addition, the two companies will engage in targeted marketing activities to drive greater awareness of Information Builders in Systech’s core markets.

About Information Builders

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 16,000 customers for the past 35 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,350 people and has more than 250 business partners.

About Systech Solutions, Inc.

Systech Solutions, Inc. a leading Business Intelligence Services provider, delivering complete and custom solutions/implementations. Systech leverages the power of data and information to eliminate sources of inefficiency in your business process, reducing time and increasing revenue.

Founded in 1993, Los Angeles-based Systech Solutions has grown internationally with bases in the United States and in India. This incredible growth story has resulted in Systech being named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in America for two consecutive years by Inc. Magazine. To offer its clients cost-effective solutions, Systech established an Offshore Technology Center as well as Systech Academy in Chennai, India – specializing in Data Warehousing, Data Integration and Business Intelligence.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Wall Street steps up analytics spending

Over 90% of Wall Street firms expect to increase spending on analytics over the next year, with risk and compliance the areas most likely to see greater investment, according to a survey from IBM and Sifma.

The poll of nearly 250 business and IT Wall Street professionals shows firms are increasing their focus on systemic risk strategies as they prepare to meet the government’s increased transparency demands.

Of all regulatory activities, systemic risk was chosen by 55% of respondents to be the largest driver of IT investments. Building on that trend, risk analytics for compliance was ranked as the top analytics investment opportunity, at 37%, beating out categories such as analytics for client segmentation, on 21% and external fraud, 13%.

IBM says concerns about the economy are beginning to wane as for the first time since the 2008 financial collapse, prompting firms to revisit the use of IT to promote organisational sustainability.

Key priorities include innovating processes around trading, portfolio management and risk management but, surprisingly, client relationship management ranked last out of 17 categories with backing from only two per cent. Almost half of respondents expect 20% to 30% of their technology budget to be allocated for ‘transformational initiatives’ in 2010 and 2011.

Meanwhile, 90% of participants expect to outsource one or more of their processes this year with compliance reporting and analytics for risk the most likely fields.

Despite the positive technology investment outlook, Wall Street professionals cite lack of IT staff and high implementation costs as the biggest inhibitors for technology implementation, consistent with findings for last year. To overcome some of these challenges, the industry is showing a larger appetite for disruptive technologies such as cloud computing – 61% – to force business model change.

Shanker Ramamurthy, GM, IBM Financial Services Sector, says: “Coming out of the largest financial crisis in modern day history, there has never been a more important time for firms to capitalise on technology investments to make sense of the data and gain a more sophisticated understanding of risks. The road to recovery is built on infusing intelligence across operations, streamlining costs and getting back to basics so that firms once again focus on innovation and growth.”

Tom Price, MD, Sifma, adds: “Having the right technology in place is more essential than ever in efforts to monitor risk across firms and ensure regulators can identify and address potential problems before they escalate.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

MicroStrategy to Initiate High Performance Testing on Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance

McLean, Va., June 21, 2010 – MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, and Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ), a global leader in data warehouse, analytic, and monitoring appliances, today announced the delivery of a state-of-the-art Netezza data warehouse appliance to MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy will conduct high-volume, high-scale tests on the Netezza appliance as part of its High Performance initiative launched earlier this year.
Netezza has provided a TwinFin data warehouse and analytics appliance with more than 100 terabytes of user data capacity to MicroStrategy’s High Performance and Scalability Lab. MicroStrategy’s Performance Engineering team will use the Netezza appliance to run hundreds of large-scale tests to research, identify, and resolve potential performance obstacles for customers.

MicroStrategy’s High Performance initiative includes the formation of its High Performance and Scalability Lab, the creation of a dedicated Performance Engineering team, and specific R&D efforts solely focused on providing MicroStrategy customers with the highest levels of performance for BI applications of all sizes. With its high performance initiative, MicroStrategy plans to deliver up to 10x faster BI applications, provide faster than 3-second response times for most predictable queries and analyses, and provide faster than 5-second response times for the majority of ad hoc queries.

The combination of MicroStrategy and Netezza enables joint customers to perform advanced analytics on large volumes of data with maximum performance. Approximately one-third of Netezza’s customers use MicroStrategy for their business intelligence requirements. Mutual customers of MicroStrategy and Netezza include: Ahold, AutoTrader.com, Burlington Coat Factory, Con-way Freight, LoanPerformance, Pacific Sunwear, Ryder System, and Thomas Cook.

“Netezza is delighted to provide MicroStrategy with the TwinFin data warehouse appliance, which is designed for rapid analysis of extremely high data volumes,” said Matt Rollender, Director of Strategic and Technology Partnerships at Netezza. “The complementary technologies of MicroStrategy and Netezza provide leading enterprises with the power to analyze expanding data warehouses and distribute actionable information to thousands of diverse users.”

“MicroStrategy and Netezza have a strong business and technology relationship focused on providing customers with high performance and scalability at a low total cost of ownership,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “The new TwinFin appliance from Netezza represents a significant addition to our High Performance and Scalability Lab and to our major initiative to deliver even greater enhancements in performance and scalability for our customers’ enterprise-wide BI deployments.”

About Netezza Corporation

Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ) is the global leader in data warehouse, analytic and monitoring appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise. Netezza’s technology enables organizations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in today’s data-intensive industries, including digital media, energy, financial services, government, health and life sciences, retail and telecommunications. Netezza is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts and has offices in Northern Virginia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Australia and Singapore.

About MicroStrategy

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Industry News analytics, BI partnership, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, netezza, systech

Editor's Note

Background

A major home video distribution company sought Systech’s assistance to bolster their category leadership for the DVD category in the retail scenario. They required retailer specific solutions and comparable insights across many retailers and markets.

Objective

The objective of the Category Management project is to provide the data foundation, both strategically and technically, for the overall Category Management Application and subsequent releases, the better forecasting and allocation of new releases, and fixture level assortment planning and merchandising. The approach targeted the most influential variables within a category manager’s span of control: Adjacencies, Aisle Flow, Planogram Configuration, and SKU Assortment in an effort to simplify the consumer shopping experience.

Challenges

Data

• Highly disparate sources of data made it difficult to get a holistic view
• Lack of visibility into financial performance, channel sales and inventory across 13 territories outside US

Incentives

• Category management functions between the retailer and the distributor across the globe was not aligned
• Different promotions and plannogramming at various retailers across different locations made it difficult to perform an efficient analysis

Process

• Standardization of master/reference data across multiple categories
• Required definition of goals, metrics and incentives

Technology

• Required timelines and quality of analysis on large volumes of granular data
• Needed access into significant number of resources to crunch data, gather insights and make it actionable

Solution

Systech worked with the client to develop Enterprise Data Architecture to Integrate Data and applications residing in 13 different sources across many countries. Informatica was configured for the ETL process to extract data from source & populate the data mart. Systech’s seamless data exchange through automation, resulted in minimal manual intervention. Conversions and interfaces were also built from existing and legacy systems to a flexible platform, and migration was managed without any disruptions to the users. To make the deployment efficient, Systech adopted a Phased Approach (by territory)

Systech also designed, developed & implemented the data warehouse, the reporting & Dashboard applications to provide information on Sales, inventory, promotion, assortment planning, merchandizing, market share by retailer, by SKU, by time, by region using MicroStrategy. Defining key business drivers and KPIs to achieve deeper insights into the product was also facilitated.

Product-specific configuration principles were developed to be implemented when new DVDs were introduced into the strategic assortment structure. In addition, Systech developed a fully automated assortment tool that integrated configuration principles with market forecasting to optimize space allocation on an account level.

The category management application was developed in an onsite – offshore model.

The underpinning category strategy set by Systech was to increase footfall into the category, by improving relevance, as well as to simplify the customer shopping experience, through improved layouts, product range segmentation and product presentation.

Results & Benefits

Assortment Planning and Merchandising

•  Assisted in determining which products should be in distribution at specific stores during specific time frames
•  Assisted in determining which, and when, to discontinue an item
•  Helped the buyer determine which assortment of products will best maximize and capitalize on seasonal changes and events like holidays.
•  Matched consumer demographic and psycho-graphic traits to store level assortment
•  Determined incremental gain obtained thrrough cross selling synergy, or diminished sales resulting from cannibalization
•  Helped understand correlations between qualitative activities, such as fixtures and displays, and quantitative results such as sales dollars and unit sales
•  Helped understand cross-merchandising patterns and opportunities, such as selling DVD’s near DVD players
•  Assessed planogram performance in maximizing store sales and/or category profits

Market Share Analysis

•  Assisted in determining the performance of retailers and products across different geographic areas such as the West coast, Midwest, Los Angeles, etc.
•  Evaluated the performance of retailers and products across different channels such as grocery, mass merchant, specialty
•  Assisted in ranking and assessing the performance of vendor sales for specific products across retailers
•  Helped compare the retailer’s sales performance against another part of the market, or across the market as a whole.
•  Assessed the opportunities of expanding the retailers’ footprint into new markets, categories, or channels.
•  Evaluated Market Share across studio, brand, genre, format, top selling DVD

Sales and Inventory Analysis

•  Assisted in analyzing POS sales performance based on product, vendor, store, division, or time frame
•  Evaluated sales, profit, and distribution share across the retailer categories
•  Assisteded in ranking, contrasting, and evaluating the sales, profits, and related performance of specific products across brands or franchises
•  Helped understand how to maximize sales performance based on the physical store layout and store type
•  Assisted the retailer in managing out-of-stocks, as well as assessing opportunity cost
•  Helped the retailer manage inventory capacities at both the warehouse and store level
•  Assisted in planning initial forecasts, as well as replenishments order requirements
•  Evaluated the impact on category profits by analyzing shrink and loss prevention
•  Helped better manage the inventory process by monitoring the product movement

Promotion and Event Analysis

• Assisted in determining increases or decreases in sales resulting from promoting two or more items together
• Evaluated the sales, profit, or distribution or a new item launch or re-priced item
• Determined the impact to product and category performance in conjunction with the price elasticity
• Assisted in assessing the performance of specific retail promotional tactics and combination of Ad Price, Display, Price Points, etc.
• Assessed the performance of special events such as a sporting event tie-in, celebrity store signing, etc.
• Determined the performance of special pack configurations, such as dual packs, premium packs, special editions, limited editions, etc.
• Understood the impact and value add of promotional themes and circular themes
• Assessed the impact of product placement in an advertisement or Sunday circular
• Compared and analysed retailer promotional price point against competitor promotional price points

The majority of concepts developed through this project have been implemented by retailers, leading in all cases to double digit improvement in performance for both the DVD category as a whole, and the whole DVD distribution enterprise.

Systech Corner Assortment Planning and Merchandising, category management, Data Foundation, Market Share Analysis, Promotion and Event Analysis, Sales and Inventory Analysis