The customer is an large sales, trading and retail company dealing with consumers, business customers and business partners. Its strategic alignment is clearly directed towards innovation and services. The product range includes own and third-party products and therefore places special demands on an efficient system.

Initial situation

The customer has at its disposal at the start of the project an Access database whose performance is inadequate in respect of the revenue accounting. It is therefore envisaged that the revenue accounting and several new functions be transferred from the central sales controlling and settlement system during the course of the relaunch of the variable remuneration.

Superseding Excel tables for variable remuneration

The challenge

• Extremely short window
  Just 3 months until the desired operational readiness of the newly-developed variable remuneration
• Greatest possible flexibility of all applications
  Flexible and swift reactions to new requirements of the customer’s sales sector, which at this point is still under construction.
• Minimal input
  It is envisaged that the employees can use the new system as far as possible without administrative input and technical know-how.
• Comprehensive compatibility
  The fact that to date the Access database is supplied with data from various external systems, and that the database forwards data to other systems, places particular demands on the interfaces of the solutions that are to be newly implemented.

Implementation – from the ACTUAL to the TARGET situation

• Meeting deadlines
  The variable solution got off to a successful start in January 2005.

• Performance features
  The desired flexibility of the variable remuneration in respect of its efficiency is guaranteed, in particular, by way of the following functionalities:
  
  • Flexible organisation of the target agreement
    The new system means any number of individual, team-based and qualitative targets can be set up which in total amount to 100%. The respective targets can be linked to any number of individually weighted products.
  • Calculating the variable salary
    The variable salary can be calculated on a quarterly basis (peak settlement) or by way of monthly settlements.
  • Updating the achievement of targets on a daily basis
• Data records
  The existing data have been adjusted and prepared for the efficient performance of the variable remuneration and all additional applications. Our experts have drawn on the qualitative optimised data to design and establish a database.
• Archiving system
  Data that are to be archived are transferred from the data warehouse to the SAND Searchable Archive where the data are compressed into about 5% of the original volume and stored on a long-term basis. By way of previously specified criteria, the data can be accessed for direct use or for use via the data warehouse for analysis and controlling.
• Complexity & speed
  The enormous quantity and complexity of calculations for a considerable number of employees is guaranteed by using a data warehouse on the basis of a SAND Analytic Server. Compared with the relational databases, this vectored database system offers a 60% to 70% space saving and considerable greater performance. Therefore all the sales data of a quarter can be evaluated daily at great speed, aggregated and compressed in a single value – the achievement of targets. The data warehouse is accessed either via SQL or via the interfaces ODBC, OLE-DB or JDBC, in which case each standard OLAP tool can be used for analysing and preparing data.

The result

The targets earmarked in the conception phase were reached merely after a single “trial quarter". Furthermore the optimisation of the entire system and the database created a solid basis for further developments.