Johannesburg, 13 Jul 1998
Sara Lee-DE, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sara Lee-DE Utrecht (Holland), has chose Red Brick as the database for its data warehouse. One of the largest global producers and distributors of branded consumer goods, Sara Lee-DE specialises in household and body care, coffee and grocery and direct selling products.
Red Brick is distributed in South Africa by Software Futures, a Computer Configurations Holdings company.
Tony Brennan, IT manager at Sara Lee`s head office in Durban, says the company`s primary challenge was to get detailed information to the desktop as quickly as possible.
"To make educated business decisions for the company, we needed to have easy access to a three-year sales history across our product range," he says. "For practical reasons, information was needed at the workstation level."
An obstacle to this challenge was the slow turnaround experienced in the retrieval of information from the off-site storage facilities employed by Sara Lee.
"We needed to find a way to serve information to the right people at the right time without delay," says Brennan. "Since the company depended on the IT department to resolve this obstacle, it was up to us to find a workable solution."
Brennan investigated several IT options over an 18-month period. He concluded that a data warehouse met the criteria for the rapid provision of detailed analytical data and information on the company`s data store.
"A data warehouse allows us to keep vast amounts of low-level detail on our data that can be accessed quickly for frequent market analyses," says Brennan. "After we investigated four separate data warehousing solutions, Red Brick proved the best choice for a medium-sized company such as ours."
As an optimised relational database with no transactional functions, Red Brick is streamlined to deliver the fastest possible query response in a data warehousing environment.
"Our OLTP system was not designed to hold vast amounts of data or to provide query performance," says Brennan. "Red Brick, on the other hand, gives us the fastest, most cost-effective data warehouse solution."
Red Brick fits in with the company`s existing IT environment. It is installed on a dedicated 400MHz Digital Alpha NT server that Sara Lee intends to upgrade with a second processor in an SMP configuration to further tweak the performance of the data warehouse.
"We use Brio as the front-end tool on our workstations, configured with Microsoft`s Office and Windows 95," adds Brennan. "This allows us to query the database directly using the industry-standard ODBC protocol."
Sara Lee makes extensive use of an EIS as part of its data store. According to Brennan, Red Brick was selected for its complementary role to the EIS. "We don`t expect our data warehouse to replace our EIS," says Brennan," but since the EIS doesn`t lend itself to retrieving detailed data in an easily accessible manner, Red Brick makes business sense as an excellent complementary solution."
Prior to placing an order with Software Futures, Brennan did a proof of concept using live data at the site to thoroughly test all aspects of the product.
"Software Futures sat through a full-day explanation of the Red Brick solution prior to installing the software for us," says Brennan. "We were impressed by their level of expertise, professionalism and knowledge of the product with respect to our business needs."
Red Brick will go live with a five-user licence towards the end of July. Brennan expects to increase this number to 10 in the short term and 20 in 18 months.
Sara Lee serves the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) market, which means its products have a relatively short lifecycle, and production decisions need to be taken in an equally short space of time. "With Red Brick we`ll be able to take decisions sooner, and far more accurately than before, and increase our competitive advantage significantly," concludes Brennan.
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