For Vodacom Service Provider Co (VSP), the sales and marketing arm of SA`s cellular giant Vodacom, customer service means more than just providing a cellular phone, a connection and a support line to call when something goes wrong. The company has joined forces with CenterField Software to deploy Ascential DataStage, the world`s leading enterprise data integration solution, to provide its customers with the most cost-effective tariff packages on the market.
"Back in 1998 Vodacom decided to implement a tariff-optimisation tool," says Willie Ellis, IT and billing director for VSP. "But to make this product function effectively, we needed seamless integration between the tariff optimiser, a data warehouse and our e-tail system. This led to the first data warehousing project at VSP.
"At the same time, we were also busy generating many online transaction processing (OLTP) reports on a regular basis from transaction systems that delivered their fair share of inconsistent data," adds Ellis "The data warehousing solution was therefore also a way to relieve the burden on the OLTP systems, and to identify and reduce the volume of bad data used in calculations and forecasts."
The decision on which extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool would be the most effective for its data environment was an easy one to make, with Ascential`s DataStage being the tool recommended by the company`s suppliers. "It was a case of using an ETL tool - DataStage - or relying on scripts," notes Ellis.
DataStage is used to gather and process data from the various transactional systems, such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the billing system and various in-house development projects. DataStage then takes the data, once it has cleaned it and converted it into the correct format, and populates the data warehouse. The ETL process deals with 200 million database records a month.
This is not the end of the process for DataStage, however. It is once again used to extract, transform and load data from the data warehouse to the applications that depend on it as their information source.
Firstly, the tariff optimiser makes use of the warehouse`s data, analysing the latest, cleansed subscriber data. It examines the calling patterns of each subscriber and suggests the optimal tariff that would make Vodacom`s cellular service more cost-effective for the company`s corporate clients. "Basically, the tariff optimiser is an effective customer relationship management (CRM) tool made possible by the data we have in the warehouse," continues Ellis.
Secondly, Vodacom`s Executive Cockpit, a digital dashboard giving executives an instant view of the status of their areas of the business, also gathers its information from the data warehouse via DataStage. Although the data is aggregated when it populates the data warehouse, it must be further aggregated (by DataStage) when added into the dashboard environment.
"The dashboard is also a supply chain management tool," adds Ellis. "A single click and managers can see the state of stocks, back orders, warehouse movements and more." To keep the system up to date, it is refreshed hourly, via DataStage, as the latest information from the day-to-day transaction systems is made available.
In May this year, Vodacom upgraded to DataStage XE, the latest version of the product. "The DataStage product family is the highest-performance, most highly scalable ETL solution," says Julian Field, MD of CenterField, the sole distributor for Ascential in South Africa. "DataStage XE has been bolstered with end-to-end metadata management and data quality assurance functions that permit customers to create and manage scalable, complex data integration projects for enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, SCM, BI/analytics, e-business and data warehouses."
To date, Vodacom has made use of the quality manager included in DataStage XE to trawl the company`s databases, auditing the quality of the company`s data to sift out any inconsistent data. In this way we are able to identify suspect, or bad data and prevent it from being included in the data warehouse," says Ellis. "We can also note in which transaction system the data resides and take steps to deal with it."
DataStage has also been integrated with VSP`s short message service (SMS) platform. If DataStage fails to execute a job as expected, an SMS is sent to the appropriate member of staff who can take the necessary steps - in some cases, by SMS as well. For example, the employee can request and obtain a status report on any job via SMS.
"The ETL tool from Ascential has proved stable and flexible," notes Ellis. "It integrates with all our transactional systems with ease and is also very easy to come to grips with. If one person leaves the company, it does not create a major headache as it is a relatively simple task for the next person to pick up and carry on, as far as DataStage is concerned.
"In addition to the excellence of the product, the support we have received from CenterField Software has been top-notch. Even during the changeover period when the company Ascential Software was born, our support was consistent and the local office made the changeover completely seamless. Our Ascential support partner, Comparex Africa, has also provided the support, skills and training we needed to make the whole project a success."
DataStage has provided Vodacom with the ability to ensure that all its business decisions are based on complete, accurate data. It enables the company to get useful answers to business users faster, speed the time-to-value and ROI of enterprise applications, and continuously adds value to corporate data. Following on from the success of this project, DataStage is currently being considered for roll-out into other areas within the rest of the Vodacom group
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