18 March 2009

Bon Marche’s vision was to have a BI solution that would be fast and reliable

Established in 1982, Bon Marche – part of The Peacock Group – is one of the UK’s leading high street ladies’ fashion retailers with over 380 branches.

For a number of years Bon Marche had used an Oracle-based data warehouse to store transactional data. Analysis of this data was provided via a suite of Business Objects reports. As the business expanded, this legacy system began to struggle to provide the reliability and responsiveness that the key personnel at Bon Marche required and the need for an alternative solution became a priority.

A project was initiated to source a replacement BI system for the company. “We needed a BI/data warehousing solution that gave us improved response times, was robust and reliable, used modern technologies and gave us a low-cost alternative to Business Objects for our ever-increasing base of colleagues requiring reports from the system,” says Dean Fearnsides, IT Manager at Bon Marche. “We also wanted to take advantage of the increased performance of the new system as soon as possible and with minimal disturbance to our existing user base.”

Dean and his team held discussions with a number of BI vendors over a six month period, culminating in a shortlist of two companies who were invited to draw up proposals covering technologies, approach and costings.

Within three months of the project kick-off, we were running existing reports in a fraction of the time they used to run on the previous system

Dean Fearnsides, Bon Marche “The proposal from Infodepth showed that they clearly understood our requirements and how to achieve them,” says Fearnsides. “Their practical approach combined with a very realistic cost model made the final selection easy.”

The data warehouse solution that Infodepth supplied to Bon Marche incorporates all of the transactional data elements that the legacy system held, together with a significant number of new data items that had not previously been available for in-depth analysis.

The database selected was SQL Server 2005, using integration services for data loading and verification, analysis services to provide OLAP technology and reporting services to provide Web-based reporting throughout the company. In addition, OLAP cubes provide the option of interactive analysis of data via Microsoft Excel and key users are able to build their own reports using Report Builder.

Fearnsides explains: “With our previous BI system, we had a limited number of report producers due to the relatively high cost of Business Objects licences. With the Infodepth solution, however, any Excel user can be given the authority to access the OLAP cubes at no extra cost. When this is allied to the power of using Report Builder and BI development studio, we have a very powerful solution with a very low cost per user.”

Bon Marche’s vision was to have a BI solution that would be fast and reliable, using the latest Microsoft technologies and this has been brought to reality by Infodepth. There is now more low-level transactional data being loaded into Bon Marche’s SQL Server data warehouse than there ever was under the older Oracle-based solution and the overall load time is much faster.

Report production is more flexible and cost-effective than before and Fearnside’s colleagues have been impressed by the speed of response. “Within three months of the project kick-off, we were running existing reports in a fraction of the time they used to run on the previous system,” comments Fearnsides. “Six weeks further on, the new data and reporting facilities were available allowing us to move forward seamlessly without drama or disruption.”

“Most importantly, the project has been delivered on time, and within budget,” concludes Fearnsides. “Working with Infodepth has been an easy and enjoyable experience.”

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