Rive Gauche was defined between IBM Cognos BI and Oracle BI

The NaviCon Group company completed an implementation project of a specialized analytical system in Rive Gauche company. The project is implemented based on IBM Cognos BI.

Who customer and premises of the project

[1]Rive Gauche is the Russian perfumery and cosmetic network. It is founded in 1995. The network is a part of Perfume Standard holding. Since the end of 2007 the network belongs to Finstar holding which acquired 75 % of shares of Rive Gauche. For June, 2010 the network integrated 120 shops in 64 cities of the Russian Federation. In shops "Rive Gauche" the various range of perfumery and cosmetics – from luxury brands to a massmarket is provided.

Opening by the company in 2009 of new shops became the main premises of the project. It considerably increased amount of data, coming to the accounting system which performance was not expected such amount of information. As a result, for preparation of analytical reports more time began to be required, they lost the relevance, so, key heads could not make timely weighed management decisions.

Project Goals and Objectives

Within the project it was going to solve the following problems:

• replace the solution "1C: Enterprise" functioning in the company which was used for reporting, on a specialized analytical system which would differ in high-speed performance, flexibility and high performance.
• give an opportunity to users to create necessary reports independently, without resorting to the help of IT specialists. It will allow to accelerate process of receiving necessary report forms and optimizes loading of IT department of the company.

Choosing a Solution

The choice of the solution in the company of the customer was performed on the basis of the tender. Four offers from market leaders of system integration were considered. IT consultants proposed to implement own approach and also software products which, according to participants of the tender, most effectively will be able to solve the problems facing the company. As such software products, in particular, were offered IBM Cognos BI and Oracle BI.

To prove to the customer that in this project use of the solution IBM Cognos BI will be the optimal (most effective), the NaviCon Group company carried out test drive of a system on the large volume of data. Specialists of the IT consultant set up the solution IBM Cognos BI on the database of Rive Gauche and developed a prototype of analytical model according to the analysis of sales. Such practical demonstration of systems capabilities for interactive data analysis and creation of any reports from the leading world vendor allowed to show not only advantages of the solution, but also professionalism of specialists of NaviCon Group.

Stages of the project and its terms

Today the first stage of the project is completed. The solution of relevant tasks for the staff of commercial department and division of marketing became its result. For automation of these tasks the Rive Gauche company bought 15 licenses, including licenses for viewing reports and interactive data analysis and also the license for development of analytical models and reports.

Works on implementation of this stage lasted 4 months.

Key features of the implemented solution

The data warehouse was developed for the customer. Detailed data on retail sales (lines of checks), information on cost value, different price types, information on different types of payments, including payments by gift certificates, sales plans, purchase plans, various reference books and qualifiers are loaded into it. Loading of this information happens every night. At this stage hundreds of millions records, the size of an OLAP cubes - more than 10 gigabytes are loaded into an analytical data storage. The average time of a response to requests of users is measured seconds. Further, at development of the project, amounts of data will increase much.

On the basis of information consolidated in storage the analytical IBM Cognos models are created BI.

Information analysis is carried out on more than 30 cuts in any variations:

• on time with detailing about a year/month/week/day/hour of day;
• to regions/shops; 
• to the nomenclature with detailing to SKU;
• on properties of the nomenclature;
• to demographic data of clients;
• to characteristics of a customer behavior

and so on.

Project deliverables and responses of the customer

The main project deliverable is an opportunity for specialists of the customer to analyze information on sales. And to do it quickly and in different cuts.

"For the management and specialists of the companies working at retail market it is crucially important to have the most up-to-date information about that how many and in what shops of network was sales for a certain period what goods are in the greatest and smallest demand in specific regions and shops as demand seasonally changes and time of day what clients buy each of types of goods by what arguments they at the same time are guided, etc. Today, thanks to cooperation with NaviCon Group company, we can obtain all volume of this information, so, in time see and prevent or minimize negative trends. Without a possibility of operational receiving and data analysis about the activity the company will hardly be able to survive in such highly competitive market as retail. For preserving of the leading positions in a segment of retail sales we plan further development of a system within which a transfer of all analytical reports from a system "1C: Enterprise" in IBM Cognos BI, and connection of users from other divisions of the company will be made" - Andrey Orlov, the Director of business process management and IT of strategy of Rive Gauche company comments on project results.