Subscribe
About

Bridgestone gets a grip with Informix Red Brick

Johannesburg, 20 Apr 2001

Bridgestone, the world`s leading manufacturer of tyres for passenger cars, trucks, buses and other commercial and recreational vehicles, has become the latest company to implement and manage critical business processes with Informix Software`s Red Brick Decision Server.

Bridgestone is using Red Brick to come to grips with the global distribution of more than 100 000 products, and is relying on it to analyse sales data and customer information from its vertically oriented business systems, and to identify and understand customer needs and relate them to product supply.

Red Brick allows Bridgestone to grasp market needs quickly and accurately, and adjust product supply to where it is most suited to the customer.

"We chose Red Brick Decision Server because it was the system that fitted in best with how we anticipated using a data warehouse," says Sei Murata, manager of information systems for Bridgestone Tyre Marketing Division. "In addition to high-speed search and accumulation functions, we had been thinking about using the solution for ad hoc retrieval. We found that the system that fit our usage pattern the best was Red Brick Decision Server.

The system`s functionality was clearly dominant over other options."

Since the sales cycle for tyres is long, Bridgestone data needs to be accumulated and analyyed over an extended period of time. If the year`s sales window for studless tyres is missed, for example, it will not return for another year. With hundreds of thousands of products further multiplied by factors of territory and seasonality, the company needed the ability to accumulate data, build up knowhow, and make marketing decisions based on statistical models. As a result, selecting a system with the power and functionality that Red Brick Decision Server provides was a necessity.

"Red Brick offers users the power and performance to use live statistical data to develop and test scenarios that until now could only be hypothesised," says Simon Jeggo, country manager for Informix Software South Africa.

Share

Editorial contacts

Dawne Canning
FHC SA (Pty) Ltd
(011) 608 1228
dawne@fhc.co.za