Data Warehouse Project

SITUATION

This growing, mid-market company defined an aggressive growth strategy and needed to operate more efficiently to remain competitive.

In order to do so, they needed to overcome their data challenges. Executives and the Board had 5 reports on revenue, but none matched, they had no idea what their true revenue or expense numbers were. On top of that, one business unit was losing at least $1M a year, but they could not get the exact figure.

They saw margins rapidly shrinking and needed to manage their inventory more strategically.

CHALLENGE

The client had no idea on how they could solve their problems, or even where to start. On tip of that, they had not invested in their IT infrastructure or technology platforms for over 14 years. All of their systems were outdated and out of maintenance.

ACTION

Our team worked with executives and business leaders to understand the challenges they were facing. They had no mechanism to see how the company and business units were performing. It was clear that they had no visibility of their data in order to make informed decisions. Our advice was to define a data warehouse and leverage an analytics platform, hence our Data Warehouse project.

Full On Consulting developed an approach that consisting of two tracts, business process and technology. From a business process perspective, we worked with the business units and executives to change their mindset from tactical, day to day decision making to strategic decision making. This was a drastic culture change and shift in thinking. We worked with them to define the metrics they needed to run the business. Metrics were defined across operations, financials, sales and marketing and divisional roll-up to overall corporate performance.

On the technology side, we leveraged the company’s SAP platform, Magento eCommerce platform, Salesforce and warehouse management systems. The company had a substantial amount of information. The problem was that all the data was siloed in each of the respective technology platforms.

To overcome this obstacle, our Data Management Consultants defined a new data warehouse and real-time, data analytics platform. An enterprise data model was developed and processes were implemented to pull information from the technology platforms and populate the data warehouse. We worked with the executives and business unit leaders to validate the accuracy of the data and to train them on the aggregation of data and views on information at their fingertips.

The Full On Consulting team implemented a phased approach to prove out the processes and foster adoption by the business. The team started with inventory management and operations. Sales was implemented next then financials.

RESULT

The Data Warehouse and Analytics platform provided the information the executives and business leaders were drastically needing. They were able to see a near, real-time view of company financials, business unit financials, inventory turns, high margin items and other key metrics. Something they never have had.

The executives and business leaders were able to make their critical decisions using actual data. On top of that, they could now accurately report to the board. In the past, there were several business reports, all of which never matched. With the new solution in place, not only can they accurately report, but they could use their mobile phones to see how their company was performing, to the nearest minute. Quite a success!