BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Case 1 - RETAIL - large Retail Chain in USA

Case 2 - MANUFACTURING - Large Manufacturer of fragrances

Case 3 - TELECOM - Large Cellular Operator, Mexico

Case 1:
RETAIL
Customer: Large Retail Chain in US
Technology: Business Intelligence

The Customer

The Customer is a leading retail and food distributor among the top 12 food retailers in the United States with over a thousand retail stores, including hundreds of licensed locations across several states. It caters to over 1100 stores of varying sizes which represent regional and national chain supermarkets, corporate-owned and licensed retail locations, mass merchandisers and e-tailers.

The Challenge

The customer's Category Managers are responsible for sales, margin, profitability, vendor management, inventory management, budgeting, and brand management. They needed a system which would effectively assemble and manage data from various sources, analyse data and monitor and measure performance. Although the customer had developed a Data Warehousing application the managers were unable to obtain the right data at the right time to make informed decisions.

The Solution

Tata Infotech stepped in to support and enhance the existing data warehouse. Using its onsite-offshore methodology, the team acquired in-depth knowledge of the entire function of the relevant subject areas and gradually moved the bulk of the work offshore. Enhancements were made in the form of a MicroStrategy -driven desktop and web-based reporting environment needed by the category managers and an ad hoc querying tool that is supported by the Oracle and Teradata system.

The Benefits

• Reducing the time to make data available to business users has helped them have better control in analyzing the profitability of a particular brand.
   
• The new system provides data at a higher level of granularity as against the earlier monthly level of summarized data.
   
• The customer has achieved significant reduction in cost of ownership of the data warehouse as a result of Tata Infotech's onsite-offshore model and 24x7 support of key business applications.
  

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Case 2:
Manufacturing
Customer: Large manufacturer of flavors and fragrances
Technology: Business Intelligence

The Customer

Our customer is a leading manufacturer of flavors and fragrances, supplying raw materials to major manufacturers worldwide. The customer has over 5000 employees and 2500 suppliers worldwide with multiple production sites distributed across 4 continents.

The Challenge

In its daily operations, the customer undertook the arduous task of collecting and collating information regarding various ingredients from disparate data sources. This was compounded by the fact that the systems providing the relevant information were regional in nature.

What was obviously needed was a web-based Business Intelligence application that would facilitate the distribution of information across geographical locations while considering data security issues.

The Solution

An automated job, using Visual Age for Java, was designed to extract data from the source systems and load the data into the database at pre-defined times. The database has a centralized repository supported by a relational structure. Staging tables were built to support reporting on complex queries. Components from the Cognos suite of products were used as a web-based reporting tool for data analysis by users across the globe.

The Benefits

• Users can manage and track all the capital expenditure projects through the entire project life cycle.
   
• Users are able to analyze the status and approvals for projects and the budgets based on actual expenditure.
   
• Ad hoc reporting based on various key parameters.
   
• Enhanced decision making by entering the most relevant data.
   
• Reduction in the time taken for data entry and analysis.
  

Testimonial

The customer Project Manager has this to say: "The application was released in production one year ago and has been working perfectly. I wanted to write this mail to mention again that [the application] is a high quality tool built by a high quality team and that we are very happy with the delivered application."

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Case 3:
TELECOM
Customer: Large Cellular Operator, Mexico
Technology: Business Intelligence

The Customer

The customer is one of the largest cellular service providers in Mexico with 700,000 customers and more than one million connections across 11 cities in Mexico, offering a variety of prepaid and postpaid services. The customer also distributes mobile handsets from various vendors through direct and indirect sales channels.

The Challenge

With massive expansion plans on the cards, the customer needed a Business Intelligence solution that would help it to use its operational data effectively to retain customers and increase their market share and airtime. The customer needed a system that could assist them in analysing the usage patterns of customers based on various factors like rate plans, origin and destination of calls and types of calls. The analysis would assist them in understanding customer preferences, equipping them with information needed to broaden their customer base and increase market share and revenue.

The Solution

Tata Infotech has a telecom-specific Business Intelligence solution - BI4tel (Business Intelligence for Telecom). The solution offers key advantages, such as a telecom-centric data model, reduced costs and quick results. The implementation of BI4tel involved the effectuation of KPIs in call usage and churn areas. The Call Usage KPIs help in analyzing airtime in terms of number of calls, real and billed seconds, while the Churn KPIs enable auditing of customer cancellations. BI4tel also provides for dynamic generation of standard reports in a matter of seconds.

The Benefits

With the BI4tel solution in place, the customer is now in a position to create attractive rate plans to increase airtime and revenues. It can concentrate on improving product sales by identifying those products preferred by customers. Further, it is in a position to determine the usage and cancellation patterns of different segments of customers, and the reasons for the same, thereby enabling them to take timely precautionary measures.

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