Staff Augmentation for Data Warehousing and BI

Case Study: Staff Augmentation for Data Warehousing and BI

Business Need:

A nationwide chain of 575 retail stores selling domestic merchandise and home furnishings needed to manipulate and analyze data from its stores. In addition to its own 575 retail outlets, it owned over 100 additional retail outlets operating under different names.
Each operating entity utilized web, in-store and service center sales concepts. A teradata enterprise data warehouse had been selected to consolidate all sales information and MicroStrategy BI was chosen to drive analytics and decision making. Unfortunately, data was in a multitude of locations, making it a challenge to use one RDBMS. In addition, the Company did not have the resources or the technical skill to manipulate large amounts of data.

Solution:

Keshav Consulting Solutions (KCS) was consulted for the teradata project and immediately implemented a strategy to collect data stored in different databases and in a variety of formats. KCS personnel provided Extract Transform and Load (ETL) expertise. Over 200 ETL jobs were developed and scheduled to run nightly to aggregate information from sales data, summary data, detailed data and inventory data. KCS enabled data harmonization no matter where it originated; point of sale, web or telephone-based customer service reps.

The data warehouse and business intelligence tools allowed the Company to see across all retail operations to improve profitability and efficiency. Data that was captured in the data warehouse included customer registration, checkout, product returns, and click stream data. Using MicroStrategy, we were able to build a 360 degree view of its customer base and project demand by SKU on a monthly basis. In addition, customer preferences and profiles were aggregated to segment customers and develop more relevant, targeted email offers. KCS staff worked with business analysts to do complex analysis such as identifying stores that were cannibalizing sales of home décor products from parent stores.

Benefits:

KCS helped to deliver one integrated system and central data handling method enabling teradata to be integrated with third party systems. With this implementation the Company was able to:

• Improve decision making by referencing historical data
• Reduce overstock and minimize inventory requirements
• Assist business analysts and the client report team to perform complex analytics