"Санг" develops a BI system

In the Sang company delivering household chemicals optimization of the IBM Cognos BI system is complete. The project is implemented by NaviCon Group company.

At the end of 2008 in the company there was a need for the software product for creation of analytical reports. At the same time load of the database had to be minimum. The IBM Cognos BI system conformed to the imposed requirements including regarding purchase costs and implementation.

Methodological part of the project was developed jointly with the customer's specialists. The client performed system implementation independently.

During use of a system the amount of information increased, the analytical model became complicated that led to decline in production of a system. Therefore it was required to optimize the available analytical model and reports and also to increase system performance due to optimization of settings of its semantic layer.

After optimization of a BI system the customer had an opportunity to define for how many days of trade there will last current remaining balance of goods to avoid the lost profit connected with lack of saleable articles in a warehouse and the corresponding outflow of clients; obtain in the daily mode data on planned targets, actual data and a deviation from the plan; analyze uniformity of sales by sales representatives within a month.

Besides, a system allows to remind operators of removal of prohibition on the goods prohibited to sale; monitor implementation of new products; manage trade inventories; determine the level of service by Out-of-Stock and by Overstock for motivation of logistics specialists; define not on sale goods and badly sold groups of goods.

In plans of the company – development of one more analytical model according to the analysis of settlement with partners, the analysis of transportation costs and also a design of Meter panel with key performance indicators. Besides, further it is planned process automation of planning and budgeting.

Cubes for the large company: experience of implementation and use

Daniil Osipov, the representative of the SANG trade holding told conferees about experience of implementation in the company of a basic product of an analytical line of IBM — platforms for the business analysis of IBM Cognos BI (v.8.4) —. There were several premises for implementation: lag of traditional analytics based on Excel from requests of business users (low speed, manual updating, insufficiency of data and cuts); the need for analytical reports, uniform for all holding (the holding includes 23 centers of distribution); objective inability of IT department to issue in time reports to business users; shortage of standard analytical reports of trade enterprise; lack of full management accounting for support of strategic decisions. At some point, Daniil Osipov noted, under the influence of the listed factors at company management understanding that the competent and timely analysis of operational activity — a basis for operational and strategic decisions then requirements to future analytical system were developed was created.

A new system had to be from the producer, famous in the market, have the acceptable budget of implementation and an opportunity to keep the project by own forces. In the functional relation from a system it was required that it provided ease of development of reports with forces of analysts (without involvement of programmers), the adequate speed of calculation of cubes (till several o'clock), acceptable time of obtaining reporting data by users, access from any place in the world and also mailing of standard reports on e-mail on the schedule and their unloading in the Excel format. At a choice stage in addition to IBM Cognos BI some more systems of leading manufacturers were considered, each of which was for various reasons eliminated: MS Analytic Server (development seemed to the customer difficult), Sybase IQ (high cost of a product), SAP Business Objects (also high cost, but also as the speaker was recognized, also the subjective factor worked — the presentation did not impress). Implementation of Cognos BI it was performed by own forces with consulting participation of specialists of NaviCon Group. Only three persons were engaged in the project: the project manager (he is an analyst and the developer of cubes), the SQL programmer (development of storage and procedures of an extract of data), the database manager (administration, automation of procedures of calculation). Implementation took about three months during which import of data from Excel, development of the data warehouse, a running in of technology of updating of cubes, creation of a new cube of sales and a cube of a remaining balance and also creation of the video tutorial for users analysts was carried out. To show efficiency of data preparation in a new system, the representative of SANG company gave the following example. At some point the management entered to the list of priorities of business security of assets, one of the directions of providing whom — decrease in a superlimit remaining balance (defective goods, "superlimit"). The new system of a business intelligence allowed to reveal, first, quickly a remaining balance in warehouses (ten minutes were spent for obtaining necessary reports), and then to timely monitor their decrease with encouragement of responsible brand managers (the most active of them for an effective sale of defects and stale goods even received that their photos were hung out on an honor roll). The reverse situation with business requests of users became the main result of implementation of a new system: now they significantly lag behind opportunities of an analytical system.