Implementing Business Intelligence Solution in Retail and distribution company using Cognos

 - Reporting data ware house was designed to capture
A leading manufacturing and retail company requireddata from all the three mainframe system. Data was
Business Intelligence solution to answer some keyextracted-transformed and loaded into this reporting
questions.data ware house from mainframe systems.
Problem:- A nightly ETL job was run to capture the data from
- Company was divided in Districts and Regions.the 3 systems.
District came under regions.- Reports were developed listing out Sales and other
- Data was captured in 3 I-series systems. Regionscategories district wise and Region wise. Tool used -
were not getting their district’s sales informationCognos Report Studio
correctly and in a timely fashion.- Report bursting was used to email districts and
- Managers and Directors were not getting overallregions reports on their sales. Appropriate security
sales information correctly and in a timely manner.setting ensured that districts and regions received
- No way for Managers to know which particularreport of their own sales. Tool used - Cognos Report
region is doing better or worse.Studio
- No way of knowing which warehouse is shipping the- Managers and Directors received district level
higher quantity of products.reports.
- No way of knowing which products are being sold- Dash boards were created so that Managers and
better?Directors can see summarized sales information of
- No way of knowing which customers are importantdifferent products, regions in different years at a
to the company?glance. Reports were drill-thru for detailed information.
 Tool Used - Report Studio,Cognos Connection,Cognos
Business Intelligence Solution:portlets.
Company had data but it was not intelligent enough to- Multi-dimensional cubes were created so that
answer all the above questions.Managers and directors can access the cubes and do
Approach:detailed analysis of data for critical decision making.
- Business analysis was done to get the requirementsCubes were created for all the historical years and for
from managers and directors.the relevant dimensions and measure. Tools Used -
- Report specifications and designs were formattedCognos PowerPlay Transformer,Analysis Studio.
and approved.- Users were trained to use the system.