Shoprite, Africa's largest food retailer, has selected Sybase SA's BI Practice, to assist with its enterprise data quality initiative and the implementation of the Athanor data management solution from Similarity Systems, for which Sybase is the local reseller.
The installation is aimed at enabling Shoprite to take control of its data quality, realise savings in operational costs and streamline its supply chain management for greater business efficiency.
According to Derick van Heerden, head architect at Shoprite, the implementation was carried out following the successful completion of a pilot project that addressed data quality issues with its branch location data and created a consolidated single view and source of that data.
"The pilot project was initially scheduled for a two-month period, but long before that the Athanor solution had demonstrated value in helping us address the data quality issues we experienced."
Based on the experience gained from the pilot project, Shoprite is to use Athanor to design, implement and deploy its enterprise-wide initiative for the automated cleansing and standardisation of data including real-time data management. "The major benefit of real-time data management is that quality checks can be done on the fly, as data is being entered into the system," adds Van Heerden.
Bryn Davies, Practice Manager at the BI Practice, points out that most large retail organisations find they need to manage data quality at multiple points across the enterprise and that internal data alignment is essential to efficient supply chain management.
"Moving towards a single best-of-breed solution such as Athanor enables Shoprite to implement a standardised approach to achieving high-quality data that has all the advantages of reuse, quality control and centralised management."
Davies says that by identifying data quality issues early in the effort and then using that information to drive data quality management, cleansing and standardisation processes, Shoprite can dramatically reduce the time it takes to address the issues and provide an accurate data foundation for successful data migration projects and new system implementations.
He continues by saying that the primary output that Athanor produces is standardised quality information, which can be treated as an enterprise asset and ultimately lowers costs of maintenance associated with duplication and the general inefficiencies of non-quality data.
Shoprite's Van Heerden says Shoprite has seen the potential for realising massive cost savings through the use of this solution. "It has enabled us to address many data quality issues in a short period of time and has laid the foundation for company-wide data quality improvements," he adds.
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