High street retail

Our SAP consultants were asked to review an existing Business Warehouse (BW) model which wasn’t meeting customer requirements, and to recommend an alternative which would:

• allow joined-up reporting of sales data previously held in separate silos
• integrate data from the existing point-of-sale system
• integrate data from a new courier-management system
• improve the runtime of overnight batch processing.

The existing business intelligence (BI) model contained sales data in several different cubes, created by different projects for different purposes. Some data was duplicated, while other data wasn’t represented at all. This made it very difficult for users to create a reliable view of the whole company’s sales data. The move to a new courier-management system was seen as an opportunity to trigger a complete overhaul of reporting.

We began by recommending a new data-model design. We ran workshops with different user groups in order to understand:

• how they used the existing system
• the complexities of their requirements
• the problems and frustrations they experienced
• what they wanted from their new solution.

We then designed a data-model principle which would allow our client to continue reporting on their current segmentation of sales data whilst also providing a single, harmonised view of the figures.

Once this design was approved, we developed and delivered a BW data model which satisfied the client’s reporting requirements and was optimised for efficiency of data-loading.

• We built a high-quality bespoke solution which satisfied our client’s precise reporting demands (both the accuracy of the data and the efficiency of the batch processing)
• We introduced a set of design & development standards to serve as a benchmark for future BI projects
• We provided training for users who write queries, helping them to get the most out of the new functionality we made available.

Within a few days of using the new data model, this major retailer was able to identify new ways to significantly reduce their cost of sales.