KwaZulu-Natal-based manufacturer Sara Lee has become one of South Africa`s most successful data warehousing users, reducing costs, improving profitability and identifying problem areas in the business.
It has achieved these benefits through the implementation of Informix Red Brick, the specialist data warehousing database supported and implemented by Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID). Vitally, while it has provided high-performance business intelligence, it has done this without compromising the performance of Sara Lee`s operational systems.
"Attempts to extract and summarise large amounts of data for business analysis can often result in reduced performance and usage of disk space allocated to back-office systems," says Aubrey van Aswegen, MD of KID. "This can upset the day-to-day running of a plant and the need for business intelligence is then sacrificed in the cause of operational efficiency."
Sara Lee supplies retailers with a range of household products including well known brands such as Radox, Status deodorants and Kiwi polishes. Competition is stiff and optimal discounts are offered to customers to maintain market share while maintaining overall profitability.
An internal user survey done at Sara Lee gauged that enhanced technology support was needed by the business. JD Edwards` ERP system provided the operational backbone. Pilot, a multidimensional analysis tool loaded with ERP data, performed the analysis. However, there was difficulty in data anomalies between the two systems in handling historical data.
Deborah Alderson, decision support analyst at Sara Lee, says: "We needed to analyse years of data to do realistic trends analyses. It was taking two to three days to restore historical files every time we wanted to perform data analysis, and we had to find a better solution."
Red Brick was chosen after several alternatives had been investigated. Factors supporting this choice included:
Excellent data integrity in Red Brick`s specialised database;
Very high performance with indexing and a design schema with proven rapid query extraction;
Easy and standardised data extraction using SQL;
Sophisticated date and time processing allowing complex age analysis;
Assimilation of historical and redundant data for an unlimited period; and
Low and simple maintenance excluding the need for specialist in-house support
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Red Brick
Red Brick is housed on a Compaq (formerly Digital) Alpha NT server, soon to be migrated to a dual-processor Compaq 1600 Intel-based server for increased capacity. The query solution Brio interrogates Red Brick, providing simple user access. The sales data mart incorporates five years of history and current transactions, with an average of 75 000 transactions a month. Queries can be summarised by various time periods, customer, product, depot or branch office and detail down to individual sales transaction is available. The forecasting application, linked to sales, allows comparisons and trend analysis. A data mart for general ledger analysis is also being planned.
Decision support reporting has become a permanent requirement, relied on by Sara Lee management. The scope of future plans includes further development and data mart expansion.
Feedback from business users has been very positive. Alderson says. "Targets for the reps and the commissions for agents can be calculated quickly and accurately. We can obtain a clear picture as to why we should issue credit or not.
"We find we can`t roll this solution out fast enough and I get regular requests for access from the business users at Sara Lee. The functionality will also be extended to include other business intelligence requirements."