Development of Active Enterprise Data Warehouse
Business Question/Need
As part of the client’s post-merger integration plans, the Retail Market Business Units desired a single enterprise data warehousing system, combined with multiple data marts and views, in order to present a single, consolidated picture of the merged entities. The intent of the EDW was to enable the Retail Business Units to more accurately identify and target key market segments with new promotional programs.
Technical Solution
Pinnacle developed an extract-transform-load (ETL) project life cycle process consisting of the architecture, design, development, system testing, user acceptance testing, production deployment and project management of an enterprise data warehouse for the client’s retail market business units. The engagement focused on transferring loadable files from three legacy enterprise data warehouses into a newly created EDW housed on a NCR/Teradata 5300. The engagement encompassed the full spectrum of the ETL process, beginning with the extraction of 92 GB data / 947,722,685 records per month from six mainframes located at various sites and a 24-month historical load process. Pinnacle’s success resulted in the client expanding the project’s scope to include data from three additional business units, increasing the number of resources, and extending the period of performance under this effort into seven subsequent phases.
Technology: IBM Mainframe, NCR/Teradata 5300, HP UNIX Server, C++, COBOL, SQL, KSH Scripts, Orchestrate/Parallel Extender & Datastage (Ascential Software)
Project duration: 16 months
PTR Resources: initially 15, ultimately 53
Benefits to Client
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Client able to shut down expensive, legacy system hardware platforms and consolidated three distinct production support efforts into one, thereby enabling an overall cost savings to the project and promoting a “self-funding” financial concept.
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Client able to target its promotional campaigns to different market segments more precisely and ultimately to achieve higher penetration ratios for various marketing promotions.
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Provided a single view into client’s retail market business data, including residential, small business, large business, and long distance data.
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Client experienced an overall improvement in data availability/access.