A Data Analytics Solution for E-Collaborative Product Life Cycle Management
About the Client
The Client is a global leader in collaborative solutions for the private label and branded goods industry. The Client is committed to enabling e-collaborative processes between retailers and manufacturers, thereby optimizing the sourcing, tendering, launch, and development of consumer goods. Its solutions help control product information and ensure product and food safety.
The Client's products are used by 35+ leading retailers worldwide — including 12 of the top 25 global retailers and the top three global retailers — and over 18,500 manufacturers across 110 countries. The Client maintains a global presence across more than a dozen countries.
Building Standards-Driven Collaboration Across Globally Distributed Retailer Data
The Client intended to create a system for enabling collaborative processes between retailers and manufacturers in order to optimize the tendering, launch, and development of consumer goods while ensuring standards-driven safety of food and non-food products.
The system was meant to monitor the whole life cycle of a retailer's private label and branded goods — from product quality and compliance with national and supranational standards to the color and shape of the packaging. Another goal was to provide retailers with full reporting facilities and full product life cycle analysis. Because the system targeted customers in multiple countries, it had to provide a multilingual interface.
One challenge was that the retailers' data centers were globally distributed, so it was impossible to assume any predefined data environment configuration.
A Multi-Level Data Warehouse With 20+ Customizable Reports in 16 Languages
INNERLUXES's team designed and developed a multi-level data warehouse (DWH), responding to the challenge of distributed raw-data sources. Because of the different business logic of the 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 can make changes in their data sources at any time: the system loads the data source configuration automatically from configuration description tables.
To ensure information gathering in accordance with specific needs and requirements, the team developed integration modules to collect data from OLTP systems, the DWH, and analytical modules.
INNERLUXES's analytics team created about 20 highly customizable, filterable reports to meet the needs of a particular retailer. Based on the collected information, retailers can build reports, make them more detailed by adding different criteria, and get exactly the information they need. The reports enable customers to see the full product life cycle picture.
For information safety, INNERLUXES created a system security mode under which a system of permissions was implemented. Defined users can have specific rights, such as access to additional reports and dashboards or the ability to save their filter adjustments.
As the system's users spoke different languages, the system was designed to support 16 languages, including English, French, Spanish, and German.
Full Product Life Cycle Visibility for the World's Largest Retailers
INNERLUXES created a system for e-collaborative product life cycle management that allows the Client's customers to track the whole life cycle of branded goods, control product quality, and manage relationships with suppliers, including the tender process. The system also lets users monitor product nutrients and allergens depending on national regulations.
The system was successfully implemented together with all expected reports and analysis. All tests in the Client's environment passed successfully, and the system is in use by some of the world's largest retailers. The Client was satisfied with the results.
Technologies and Tools
MicroStrategy 9.2.1, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Integration Services 2008 R2, T-SQL.