Clients

Imperial Tobacco Gains Valuable Business Intelligence Insight
Commentary by Paul Maynes, UK Systems Manager, Imperial Tobacco Limited

Imperial Tobacco Limited, a member of Imperial Tobacco Group PLC (www.imperial-tobacco.com), is a major manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of cigarettes, cigars, and hand-rolling and pipe tobaccos throughout the United Kingdom. The company’s cigarette brands include Regal, Embassy, John Player, Lambert and Butler, and Superkings, with manufacturing centered in a state-of-the-art factory in Nottingham, England. In 2000, ITL’s yearly earnings were £560m.

The Problem

Imperial Tobacco Limited (ITL) required a solution to flow transactional data entered on their sales and marketing iSeries (AS/400) system into its iSeries data warehouse. This need became more apparent as ITL discovered that queries
running on the transactional system used to drive the business were negatively impacting transaction processing.

ITL wanted to keep the data warehouse synchronized in real time with the production environment. They also needed a reliable and easy-to-use solution for integrating data between the two databases that required low transaction-processing overhead.

"We required critical customer information and transactional data to be captured, transformed, and flowed into the data warehouse data model," says Paul Maynes, UK Systems Manager for ITL. "The solution had to be capable of transferring large amounts of data in real time to get around the limited batch window problem we faced due to the size of the database and the large number of daily transactions."

"The real-time capture, transform, and flow solution provided by DataMirror Transformation Server allowed us to break the bottleneck of transferring large volumes of business data from our backup iSeries system to our data warehouse within a limited overnight batch window."
—Paul Maynes, UK Systems Manager, Imperial Tobacco Limited

The Solution

Cap Gemini, one of the largest management and IT consulting firms in the world, recommended DataMirror Transformation Server to ITL. To successfully transfer transactions to the database, ITL selected Transformation Server to capture data from the backup store and flow it in real time to a data warehousing store on the same machine.

Transformation Server enables users to capture, transform, and flow data in real time between DB2 UDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase across UNIX, Linux, Microsoft Window NT/2000, OS/400, and OS/390. Transformation Server can be easily implemented and requires no programming changes to applications and databases. Its out-of-the-box support for leading databases makes it ideal for EAI, e-business, business intelligence, CRM, and a host of other distributed data applications.

By implementing DataMirror Transformation Server, ITL was able to quickly implement a solution for active data warehousing and real-time analytics.

"DataMirror has been one of the most efficient and reliable software tools in our systems environment," says Maynes. "The real-time integration and powerful data transformations enabled by Transformation Server support virtually all of ITL’s key systems and have allowed rapid and tremendous growth."

The Benefits

Since January 1998, DataMirror has provided ITL with a fast and efficient means of integrating operational data into the data warehouse. "Transformation Server enables ITL to achieve powerful commercial insight by flowing information to a non-operational business intelligence environment where internal business analysts are free to slice and dice the data without impacting performance," says Maynes. "By implementing Transformation Server, the benefits are aimed mainly at an internal business analyst community who now benefit from having their own business intelligence environment."

Using Transformation Server, ITL mirrors approximately 300,000 transactions every night to its data warehouse. Users can now process and distribute information as often as required and leverage presentation tools to enhance the display and distribution of information to decision makers across the organization.

The Conclusion

Although ITL has not conducted a thorough return-on-investment study of the solution, industry analysts expect the average enterprise to achieve an ROI of 300 to 400 percent over three years. While most data warehouses contain an end-of-day, end-of-week, or end-of-month snapshot of operational data, many companies are realizing that corporate data is a highly perishable commodity. Like ITL, they are implementing real-time data warehouses to eliminate batch window processing and provide up-to-the-second information for business intelligence.

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5406