M.Video (Sybase IQ)

By the beginning of project implementation in M.Video company for obtaining the reporting several separate information systems were used that required heavy expenses on their maintenance, development and integration of information for reports. A large number of these systems not completely provided requirements of quickly growing company. Besides, any of systems did not support Web and therefore did not provide to technology idle time and quick access of users from shops to reports.

Thus, the company management of M.Video came to the decision on creation of a uniform information and analytical system. For achievement of this purpose the following tasks were set:

• consolidate all information of the company in the uniform data warehouse;
• provide to all users, depending on their requirements and solvable tasks, access to necessary information and to provide them with the tools allowing to solve the arising analytical problems of any complexity;
• achieve effective information support of business processes of the analysis and forecasting;
• reduce labor input of operation and maintenance of a corporate analytical system by standardization of the used software and significant reduction of time of carrying out necessary modifications.

As the strategy of the choice of components of an information and analytical system the M.Video company put the principle of "Best-of-breed" - to implement the solution, best in the class, for each functional area. The principles of selection were defined by opportunities of systems to process huge data volumes and to ensure functioning of hundreds of users both at the central office, and in shops and also a possibility of use of the difficult analytical techniques necessary for solving of tasks of retail business.

For creation of the data warehouse Sybase IQ DBMS which is specially developed for analytical data storages as an integration tool of data - Oracle Data Integrator (Oracle|Sunopsis) was selected, and for the reporting and data analysis the MicroStrategy platform was selected.

Creation of corporate storage of M.Video company was broken into stages, on each of which the range loaded into an information warehouse increased, and the solution of the typical business challenges based on this information was fulfilled.

At the first stage of the project of creation of the data warehouse completed in December, 2006 the following data were loaded into storage: retail sales, sales plans, payment of retail sales. As a result business users had an opportunity to carry out monitoring of accomplishment of plans. If earlier the report on accomplishment of the plan was sent to directors of shops of e-mail that demanded great efforts from the staff of analysis department, then now the shop director can obtain at any time through the Web client this information. The staff of finance divisions working with information which is stored in SAP BW received the simple, intuitive instrument of creation of own reports.

At the second stage of creation of the Business Intelligence system the storage was replenished with the following data: wholesales, marketing stocks, programs of additional service, activation of gift cards, types of goods, sets.

Moreover, analytical analysis techniques of issuance of credits, sales on accumulative discount cards, marketing actions, sales of dependent goods (market basket analysis) were developed.

The M.Video company received the system of the corporate reporting and analysis constructed based on the corporate data warehouse which became a source complete, approved and reliable information on activity of the company.

"We are happy with results of implementation of two stages of the project of creation of an information and analytical system and we are going to expand functionality of our storage, filling up it with the additional information", - Correa Georges, the CIO of M.Video company commented.

Main benefits

• Amount of data in HD decreased by 2-2.5 times; there was an opportunity to store history for a bigger time frame
• Also vremenna of costs for consolidation of information for creation of reports decreased resource
• Costs for administration due to reduction of quantity of the supported systems decreased
• Speed of obtaining reports by employees increased; the average time of report execution was 15-20 seconds in comparison with hours before
• Users had an opportunity of creation of own reports without participation of IT services, on a basis

uniform reference book of business terms