Johannesburg, 25 Jul 2001
J Melnick & Company (JMC), the branded foods company of wholesale distribution giant Thumb Trading, has implemented a combined data warehouse and business intelligence system that gives the company one-step access to its national and regional sales and marketing information and saves thousand of rand in administration costs in the process.
Following the success of the project, the company has also implemented a data warehouse for its financial management company, Thumb Management Services (TMS), and is planning a similar data warehouse for its non-consumables company, Heneck Sacks.
JMC is the exclusive South African distributor for a number of well known branded foods, most notably Red Bull energy drink, Lindt Chocolates and ActII Microwave Popcorn. It represents 1 000 food product lines from manufacturers around the world, supplying the country`s major retailers, restaurants and individual shop owners.
Heneck Sacks distributes 8 000 products, including toys, kitchenware, giftware and hardware, primarily to the mass retail market.
Working closely with PQ Africa`s specialist business management solutions division, PQ Tetra, the system batches operational data from TMS`s ERP software into a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse, from which sales and marketing reports can be generated on the fly in Crystal Decisions` Seagate Info or Microsoft Excel.
"Previously users had to extract data from the ERP`s flat file format into text files, convert it with third-party software, and then load the information into Excel for further processing," says IT director Francois Kotze.
"The data warehouse we developed with PQ Tetra cuts out these intermediate phases, saving users hours of work, and making information available to them quickly and accurately. It is also ideal for generating customised reports based on any combination of criteria we ask of it, be they sales and stock figures per region, per salesperson, per customer over any given time period in the past four years."
"Considering the complexity of the data, and the fact that the data warehouses store over seven million records, that`s no easy task, and we had to be very specific with our design criteria to make it work effectively on the existing server equipment," adds data warehouse administrator Ockert Brits.
"The Heneck Sacks data warehouse will take on several million more records of OLAP data processing, which will necessitate a hardware upgrade, or a way of automatically processing smaller chunks of information, or both. We are working to implement the latter by means of an incremental update method that could yield valuable cost and processing savings."
The JMC and TMS warehouses are stored on a 34GB RAID 5 disk array running on a Dual Pentium III-600, 1,2GB RAM server at Thumb Trading`s Epping head office in Cape Town. ERP data is updated nightly to the data warehouse and made available to users in four regional offices -- Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth -- over the company`s national WAN.
"We`ve been following a strategy of rapid and aggressive information delivery to our management and marketing decision-makers to help them push for every bit of advantage in a highly competitive market by making better, faster decisions with the most up-to-date information available," says Kotze.
"Already we`ve seen the dividends of this strategy and the value of the data warehouse and analysis tools, and we expect them to keep pace with our growth projections in the months ahead."
JMC`s data warehouse went live in December last year after a brief test period, with the financial warehouse at TMS following in April this year. Expected go-live date for the Heneck Sacks warehouse is the end of August.
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