Implementing Business Intelligence Solution in Retail and distribution company using Cognos

A leading manufacturing and retail company required Business Intelligence solution to answer some key questions.

Problem:

• Company was divided in Districts and Regions. District came under regions.
• Data was captured in 3 I-series systems. Regions were not getting their district’s sales information correctly and in a timely fashion.
• Managers and Directors were not getting overall sales information correctly and in a timely manner.
• No way for Managers to know which particular region is doing better or worse.
• No way of knowing which warehouse is shipping the higher quantity of products.
• No way of knowing which products are being sold better?
• No way of knowing which customers are important to the company?

Business Intelligence Solution:

Company had data but it was not intelligent enough to answer all the above questions.

Approach:

• Business analysis was done to get the requirements from managers and directors.
• Report specifications and designs were formatted and approved.
• Reporting data ware house was designed to capture data from all the three mainframe system. Data was extracted-transformed and loaded into this reporting data ware house from mainframe systems.
• A nightly ETL job was run to capture the data from the 3 systems.
• Reports were developed listing out Sales and other categories district wise and Region wise. Tool used - Cognos Report Studio
• Report bursting was used to email districts and regions reports on their sales. Appropriate security setting ensured that districts and regions received report of their own sales. Tool used - Cognos Report Studio
• Managers and Directors received district level reports.
• Dash boards were created so that Managers and Directors can see summarized sales information of different products, regions in different years at a glance. Reports were drill-thru for detailed information. Tool Used - Report Studio,Cognos Connection,Cognos portlets.
• Multi-dimensional cubes were created so that Managers and directors can access the cubes and do detailed analysis of data for critical decision making. Cubes were created for all the historical years and for the relevant dimensions and measure. Tools Used - Cognos PowerPlay Transformer,Analysis Studio.
• Users were trained to use the system.