Retail Giant Gets Customer 360 With Integrated Data Management Solution

Description

  • Integrated Data Management (IDM) Project

Business Needs

  • 360-degree Customer View
  • Data Management System

CLIENT BACKGROUND

As one of America’s premier national retailers, operating more than 855 department stores in 45 states and three US territories, this company also operates two retail websites and employs approximately 182,000 employees. Recognized as a retail industry leader in developing private brand merchandise that differentiates store assortments, they are also noted for extending its brand into the community through the sponsorship of major civic events. 

BUSINESS PROBLEM

To address anemic existing store sales growth, this company committed to three core retail strategies:

  • Localization
  • Multi-channel and Cross-channel marketing and merchandising
  • Exclusive Designer lines and increased private label branding

Effective implementation of these tactics depended on one element – a detailed knowledge of the customer – or, as their Marketing professionals term it, a data-driven “360-degree view of the customer."

The Company’s data resources and systems were unprepared for this level of target analysis.  Multiple repositories on different data platforms, incompatible schemas and formats, and a lack of standards and tools for querying and reporting formed a collective roadblock.  With this type of environment, the same data was being copied repeatedly to multiple locations with no controls for consistency.

The Company required an integrated Data Management system that would facilitate customer profiling and ultimately make possible marketing segmentation via all channels to the customer.

SOLUTION

Prolifics Information Management consultants helped design a Data Warehousing, Cleansing and Integration solution known as the “Integrated Data Management (IDM)” project.

Foundational technologies specified included:

  • IBM DB2 Data Warehouse Edition software
  • IBM WebSphere Information Server
  • DataStage
  • QualityStage
  • Information Analyzer
  • IBM WebSphere Federation Server
  • IBM Rational Data Architect
  • IBM System P570 Servers

The primary goal for the new system was to re-platform the incumbent Greenplum/PostgreSQL DataMart to a modern RDBMS, then to federate additional customer data sources to the new Data Warehouse.

The secondary goal was to cleanse and optimize the data structures for extraction and analysis.

The scope of the their IDM project included the following phases and deliverables:

  • Discovery and documentation of end user and IT requirements
  • Design of the logical and physical IDM environment
  • Creation of project and resource plans
  • Design of migration plan for the implementation of the new database environment and schema
  • Perform inventory, audit and analysis of data flow processes in comparison to prior environment
  • Implementation and configuration of the DB2 Data Warehouse, DataStage, QualityStage and Federation Server software environments
  • Documentation of installation process and map creation for file systems, software and hardware configuration
  • Design and construction of process (Information Server Jobs and Schedules) to replace the current scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and programs
  • Design and deployment of processes that cleanse, standardize, de-duplicate, match, and create survivor records using Information Server and QualityStage
  • Design, creation and documentation of configuration files needed to support jobs
  • Design of error handling module that trapped and reported invalid data, processing errors and reprocessed records with errors
  • Tuning and Optimization of the end-to-end IDM physical system and data flows for analytical processing
  • Design and documentation of a backup and disaster recovery process for the IDM environment
  • Design and documentation of a training, support and administration plan for the IDM system
  • Mentored customer staff for complete turnover of the production system

With accurate customer information, this Company’s website was able to provide marketing teams with new customer analysis to inform how Web-based and store merchandising would be executed for the 2008 back-to-school and Holiday seasons.  The website has utilized the new analytical capability to provision an e-mail campaign system that pushes product affinity offers to regular customers.