The customer is a large trading and retail company dealing with consumers, business customers and business partners. With more than 4,000 employees and a product range made up of a variety of products and services and offers of different third-party suppliers, the customer places special demands on an efficient system.

Initial situation

The data warehouse already in place at the customer and the existing standard reporting solutions no longer meet the increasing demands of the growing, international, sales company. So the customer requires a complex, interactive, management and reporting system that, in addition to illustrations in tabular form, allows in particular for a graphic illustration of trends and KPIs etc.: the so-called business intelligence on demand.

The challenge

• Definition & development of requirements
  The customer which only recently became an independent company, had not clearly defined the current and future performance requirements in respect of its own reporting technology. The initial, and key, challenge therefore consisted of the interactive development work with the customer’s respective specialist fields.
• Time pressure
  Very brief development and project times allowed the www Bitmanager AG team in part just 2 to 3 weeks in which to develop and implement various complex report areas.
• Individual reporting solutions
  The standard reporting and department solutions on the basis of Excel and Access were to be replaced by a reporting solution that is efficient in respect of scope and performance. It was to be operable as a web-based, interactive, application in real time and intuitively, and guarantee an additional presentation option.
• Interface optimisation
  The desired management and sales reporting calls for the optimisation of all interfaces to the different data sources of all partners.

Implementation – from the ACTUAL to the TARGET situation

• Definition & development of requirements
  In conjunction with the customer we developed the basic requirement specification in the common research and prototyping process into specialist-field-specific requirement profiles capable of use in the future.
• Time pressure
• Co-ordination structures geared towards efficiency and speed enabled www Bitmanager AG to implement the defined performance features irrespective of several change requests.
• Individual reporting solutions
  The newly defined reporting requirements exceed the efficiency of the reporting tool BO XI used to date. The technical basis of the new solution is made up of RIA (Rich Internet Application), Macromedia Flash and Flex 1.5, a Tomcat Application Server and a SAND Analytic Server – this optimised technological basis boasts, in particular, the following advantages:
  • Superseding standard tools
    BO XI was replaced by an innovative combination of a JSP database layer and standardised equipment. Previous department solutions on the basis of Excel and Access have been integrated in an optimised form in the new reporting technology.
  • Complex real-time reporting
    Marketing, management and sales can call up critical company information in the respective desired and relevant form. The web-based, interactive, application in real time and intuitively, and enables various area-specific analysis, reporting and presentation options. XMLMill for example generates pre-formatted PDFs directly from the database.
  • Management cockpit
    10 to 20 users have a direct and comprehensive overview of the key management figures on a specially designed, intuitively operable surface.
  • Cashiers system
    The consolidated data from the shop tills are available to the 450 or so sales managers by way of this tool in real time.
  • Test purchases
    This integrated function allows for the direct analysis and evaluation of test purchase campaigns.
• Interface optimisation
  The initial precondition for business intelligence consists of generating the appropriate information. In the case of this customer we achieved this by automatically entering the data of the many different partners in the data warehouse. By way of the interfaces to SAP, SAPHIR etc., we fill the data warehouse with data from the most varied of sources.

The result

The latest evaluations using state-of-the-art technology – the complex management and sales reporting designed by www Bitmanager AG provides the customer with precisely the business intelligence that makes a difference: the analytical concept and the processes and tools with which to convert company and competition data in specific knowledge for strategic decisions. This is what we mean by business intelligence on demand.