Container manufacturer contracts CA

Computer Associates International, Inc (CA) today announced that China International Marine Containers (Group) Co, Ltd (CIMC) has selected CA`s Advantage, AllFusion and CleverPath solutions for its major data warehousing initiative.

The integrated CA solutions will enable CIMC to more effectively leverage diverse data resources, improve responsiveness to changing market conditions, and increase profitability by lowering manufacturing costs. As a result of these improvements, CIMC will significantly enhance its competitive position in its global market.

A global leader in the manufacturing of containers, CIMC is facing intense competition from companies around the world. Accurate and time-sensitive business decisions are therefore critical for its continued growth. CIMC`s management realised that such decisions could only be made by better exploiting and leveraging its large data resources.

Those resources are primarily generated by CIMC`s ERP system. CIMC had experimented with tools such as SAS and Microsoft BackOffice to achieve its objectives. Unfortunately, those tools did not enable the rule-based transformation of CIMC`s massive data necessary to quickly and easily extract the practical reports the group`s management sought.

After an extensive review of alternative products, CIMC selected CA`s Advantage, AllFusion and CleverPath solutions to develop an advanced data warehousing and decision-support system.

The first phase of the project is to construct the data infrastructure and purchasing models necessary to enable global analysis and flexible querying of diverse purchasing data. CIMC selected CA`s AllFusion ERwin Modeling Suite to develop models based on specific business requirements and workflow. In CIMC`s case, those models incorporate elements such as purchasing contracts, purchasing plan execution, inventory analysis and price analysis. AllFusion ERwin Modeling Suite makes it simple to construct those models and provides visual charts that make the group`s complex data structures easy to understand.

CIMC selected CA`s Advantage Data Transformer to extract and integrate data from its various data sources. Advantage Data Transformer automatically generates code that simplifies the creation and management of complicated data transformations. Its Graphical Mapper rapidly structures data warehouses and business data, thereby saving valuable development time and costs.

CA`s CleverPath Forest & Trees provides CIMC a visual development environment with extensive database access capabilities, thereby making it easy to build, deploy and manage compelling decision-support systems. CleverPath OLAP Server lets CIMC conduct multi-dimensional analysis of large amounts of business-critical data. Additionally, CleverPath Portal enables CIMC to create personalised e-business workspaces for different business roles, providing interactive Web access to all appropriate data.

Throughout the implementation of the entire project, CA technology consultants provided CIMC with professional and detailed consultation. CA also provided product training to CIMC`s IT administrators, allowing them to become quickly familiarised with CA`s information management products.

"Our data warehousing project will let CIMC reap the full potential business value from all of the different types of data across the enterprise," said Wu Fapei, assistant to the CEO of CIMC. "CA`s Advantage, AllFusion and CleverPath information management solutions - as well as CA`s professional services - are absolutely essential to the success of this strategic technology initiative."

"For a global enterprise like CIMC, information is power," said Cliff Yung, senior vice president, CA Greater China. "We are very pleased that our solutions have been chosen to play such an important role in the company`s information management strategy."