Business intelligence (BI) specialist BI Planning Services is to implement an integrated BI and enterprise data warehousing solution for Clover. The turnkey project will begin with the dairy giant`s inventory systems, including logistics, production and the supply chain, and eventually stretch across the enterprise, covering human relations, finance and sales.
Martie Venter, system manager: Enterprise Business Information at Clover, says the company`s existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform was limited in terms of BI functionality and tools.
"We found that we were taking too long to deliver on business initiatives. What we needed was a methodology where we could identify our business requirements and deliver on them in a shorter period of time through the use of sophisticated BI tools. In short, we were experiencing an overflow of information and this project is aimed at streamlining the information chain. The plan is to make the Clover BI shop a world leader in terms of delivering management information," she says.
By breaking the project into smaller components, Venter hopes to lower the risks in terms of costs. "Also," she adds, "because of the platform change, we require new skills. This is one of the reasons we contracted BI Planning Services; we could not afford to learn by trial and error."
Comments Bertie van Zyl, marketing manager at BI Planning Services: "The problem in many companies is that although the business information exists, it is often departmentalised and not easily available across the enterprise. This BI and data warehouse implementation will address that problem as well as allow for central auditing of the data to ensure accuracy."
He adds that while the project is turnkey, there will be considerable knowledge transfers throughout, facilitating a seamless hand-over phase.
"BI Planning Services is currently busy with the business discovery phase of the project where we define the scope of the task ahead. The next phase is information and data discovery after which we draw up a detailed project plan with budgets and time lines.
"This initial project will set the standards for BI and data warehousing at Clover and the company will eventually be able to adopt all the documentation and processes," Van Zyl says.
Clover`s new data warehouse platform will be Windows based with an IBM DB2 UDB database. BI Planning Services has supplied Ascential`s Datastage ETL tool and modules of Cognos` BI suite. Clover is currently using Cognos` PowerPlay enterprise solution, and limited Cognos Impromptu. The new platform will be Web-driven as far as possible with the odd instances of client server software.
"We opted for Cognos because it is the recognised leader in BI enterprise solutions and the same holds true for Datastage which earned its reputation as the best-of-breed in ETL," says Venter.
"We have an extremely busy project plan ahead of us for the next year and recognised early on that we needed a partner who could help us meet our objectives. While we did consider other companies, our long-running relationship with BI Planning Services has sold us on their methodology and convinced us of their experience in the data warehousing arena," concludes Venter.
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