Data Analytics Solution For E-Collaborative Product Life Cycle Management
Customer
A global leader in collaborative solutions for the private label and branded goods industry. The Company is committed to enabling e-collaborative processes between retailers and manufacturers thereby optimizing the sourcing, tendering, launching and development of consumer goods. The Company’s solutions help control product information and ensure product and food safety.
Products, provided by the Customer, are used by 35+ leading retailers worldwide, 12 of the top 25 global retailers, the top three global retailers, over 18,500 manufacturers - all this across 110 countries.
The Company has a global presence in 13 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA).
Challenge
The Customer intended to create a system for enabling collaborative processes between retailers and manufacturers in order to optimize tendering, launching and development of consumer goods while assuring standard-driven safety of food and non-food products.
The system was supposed to monitor the whole life cycle of the retailer’s private label and branded goods, from product quality and compliance with national and supra-national standards to the color and shape of the packaging. Another goal was to provide retailers with full reporting facilities as well as full product life cycle analysis. As the system was aimed at the customers from multiple countries it had to provide multilingual interface.
One of the challenges was that retailer’s data centers were globally distributed, so it was impossible to assume any predefined data environment configuration.
Solution
ScienceSoft's team designed and developed multi-level Data Warehouse (DWH), thereby responding to the challenge of distributed sources of raw data. Because of different business logic of retailers’ data sources, up to 20 source databases located at different data centers were integrated into the DWH using data transformation. The OLTP data size was about 100 GB per data source. Thanks to the well-designed DWH retailers are able to make changes in data sources at any time: the system loads data source configuration automatically from configuration description tables.
To ensure information gathering in accordance with specific needs and requirements, our team developed integration modules to collect data from OLTP systems, DWH and analytical modules.
ScienceSoft’s analytics team created about 20 highly customizable with filters reports to meet needs of a particular retailer.
Based on collected information, retailers are able to build reports, make them more detailed by adding different criteria, therefore get the information they exactly need. Reports enable customers to see the full product life cycle picture.
For information safety purposes ScienceSoft team created a system security mode. In accordance with this mode the system of permits was implemented. Defined users are able to have specific rights, such as access to additional reports and dashboards or possibility to save their filters adjustments.
As the system users spoke different languages, the system was designed to support 16 languages, including English, French, Spanish and German.
Results
ScienceSoft created a system for e-collaborative product life cycle management that allows clients of the Customer to track the whole life cycle of the branded goods as well as to control product quality and manage relationship with suppliers, including tender process. In addition, the system allows users to monitor products nutrients and allergens depending on the national regulations.
The system was successfully implemented together with all expected reports and analysis. All the tests on Customer environment were successfully passed and the system is being used by some of the world’s largest retailers at the moment.
The Customer was satisfied with the results.
Technologies and Tools
Microstrategy 9.2.1, Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2, Microsoft Integration Service 2008R2, T-SQL.
