Informix Software, the database company, has announced that consumer products giant Canon is using Informix Red Brick Decision Server to advance its ongoing product quality analysis initiative.
"We`re making sweeping reforms in market quality programs and services across the whole corporation," says Osamu Sawamura, assistant director of the Quality Planning Center at Canon. "We needed a way for top management to be able to get a handle - in realtime - on market shifts in product quality, and a means for the quality management staff on location to act rapidly in response."
Canon developed its comprehensive Field Information Tracking System (FITS) to analyse market product quality information using Red Brick. With Red Brick as its data mining solution and high-speed query engine, FICS centrally manages data on defect and return rates for consumer products shipped around the world, including the 1 million product repairs Canon completes annually.
Product and marketing departments are both able to access information via the Internet with Red Brick, enabling timely monitoring of market product quality. As a result, market product quality analysis that once took days to complete now takes a few minutes.
"When new products go on the market, everyone is on tenterhooks - everyone wants to see what`s happening in realtime," says Brian Staff, VP marketing at Informix. "Red Brick answers that need by performing analysis every day - or even every hour."
Informix Red Brick Decision Server focuses on meeting specific business needs, including fast load performance, high-capacity/high-performance query processing and efficient management of very large databases. Unlike traditional transaction databases, Informix Red Brick Decision Server is a specialised database technology that has been designed and optimised to meet the requirements of data marts and data warehouses without the complexity and overhead that more traditional database engines require.
"The same benefits Canon has enjoyed are being gained by more than 20 customers in the local market," says Informix South Africa country manager Simon Jeggo. "Today`s economy demands that organisations are able to obtain an insight into their business while information is current and relevant, and thereby maintain competitive advantage. This is what Red Brick provides."
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