ATHENS, June 6, 2004 — Kotsovolos Dixons, the no. 1 consumer electronics retailer in Greece, selected Relational to design and implement a management information system (MIS) in order to add value to home appliance retail sales.
Relational used SAP’s BusinessObjects/Webi for corporate reporting, the Sybase IQ for the MIS database and the Informatica PowerCenter for the collection, processing and loading of data onto the MIS.
The data warehouse repository is made up of data marts, which focus on separate applications. The solution also includes the design and deployment of all necessary extract, transform, load (ETL) processes for data retrieval from production systems, data conversion, cleansing and control, as well as the process of uploading the data onto the enterprise data warehouse repository.
Creating separate and distinct data marts in specific business units of the company responded to critical demands for dynamic analysis and processing of information, which was either entirely unavailable or static and limited. Data marts were put in place for sales, purchasing, inventory, loans and cash.
Having a full MIS at hand, the IT department can now collect daily reports from the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and a multitude of peripheral sources (such as spreadsheets and data bases) with information about competition, product descriptions, point of sale availability, operation schedules across Greece, number of visitors vs number of buyers per store, etc. Information is checked and after thorough processing is uploaded onto the IQ database of the MIS. This system serves as the central point of information and produces a full range of standard reports for management, store managers, sales and marketing and all relevant divisions of Dixons abroad.
The most important benefit of this solution is the ease with which management can make strategically critical decisions on a daily basis using accurate information, thus eliminating the probability of error. Thanks to the enterprise data warehouse repository, which integrates scattered information into a unified and homogenous data retrieval system, users gain a unified and complete picture of company operations from a single source. A unified system also allows IT staff to track, check, correct and cleanse non-matching production data found on separate applications. Production databases are freed from the arduous processes of data retrieval and data mining and IT staff members are no longer required to spend endless hours supporting those difficult processes.
Kotsovolos Dixons is the no. 1 retailer for consumer electronics in Greece. Today the group operates 78 retail stores and employs more than 2,200 people. Kotsovolos specializes in the sales and after-sales service of high technology electronic products, computers, home appliances, photography equipment and telecoms products.
Relational is an international software developer and integrator with offices in five countries (Greece headquarters, Romania, UK, Dubai and Kenya) and a client base all over Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Relational’s mission is to enable enterprises to develop a competitive advantage through innovative IT solutions. Through its partnerships, R&D and numerous installations in the areas of business process management, business intelligence, data warehousing, database management, data integration, application integration and business service management, Relational has put together a reliable product portfolio of innovative solutions that add business value to its customers’ mission-critical IT systems.
