Overview: 

One of the Hong Kong base airport service company needs to improve its global reporting system in order to increase its productivity as well as its transparency to the management level. Its business is providing airport Lounge service for walk-in customers, Airlines guests and contracted Credit Card holders.

Business Needs:

- Gathering all sales data from different lounges worldwide and transforming into meaningful performance report. Reports coved but not limited to customers’ spending in all categories various from 

   Dinning, Business Centre, Hotel, Meeting Room, VIP services, Concierge, Baggage Handling, Spa, Massage, etc.

- Client’s Contracts maintenance: Updating, modifying and searching all client’s, Airlines and Credit card issuers, agreements and clearly identify its guests.

- Auto generating monthly invoices to all clients around the world based on individual client’s contract terms.

- All reports and data must be mobile and instant, allowing management team accessing and obtaining relevant reports anytime, anywhere around the world.

Solution:

1. Standardization of Entry Interface via Salesforce platform for Contract entering, tracking and sharing among departments. Created, sorted and kept all related contracts under same Client’s name for future reference.
2. Developed analytic reports basing on SSAR to analysis sales data generated from different airports worldwide. Enabling users to slice-n-dice data on one’s needs, also provided on-the-go solution for top management team. 

3. Simplified billing system by auto mapping individual Client’s contract terms to actual customer spending.

Benefits:

1. Signed off agreements could be well documented and easy to be searched
2. Sales team can evaluate sales performance more efficiently 

Client Impact:

"I’ve worked with IDC on a business intelligence project for our company. The team was very professional, dedicated, and helpful. They were very patient to understand our business requirements and ask for verifications whenever they were not clear. We had several changes and updates on our original business requirements, and they were very adaptive to incorporate the changes during the development process. They were also very good at learning new systems, including our own in house systems, in order to make them work for the project. Overall it’s been a pleasure working with them." 
       
  Fiona Hu
  CRM Assistant Manager

Overview: 

This customer is a large public utility that was transitioning to a new custom CRM solution. One of their main challenges and inefficiencies was generating reports around daily consumption data. We deployed a custom Business Intelligence (BI) solution to graphically represent this data to decrease the amount of time required to generate these reports and increase the collaboration of business units.

Organization: Large Public Utility      

Industry: Energy    

This client is one of the most significant utilities companies in the Pacific North West. It is also a noted innovator in alternative energy technologies.  
Introduction:

This customer was a large public utility that was transitioning to a new custom CRM solution. One of their main challenges and inefficiencies was generating reports around daily consumption data. IDC deployed a custom Business Intelligence (BI) solution to graphically represent this  data to decrease the amount of time required to generate these reports and increase the collaboration of business units. 

Their CRM solution primarily focused around customer management but lacked focus upon their business critical consumption information. SQL Server 2008 allowed IDC to design and create a custom Business Intelligence (BI) solution for them. The BI solution has allowed for faster business processes and more accurate reports. 

Value to the Customer: 

The customer had 10 years of historical consumption information and daily consumption information moving forward. While they could see there was great business value for analyzing large data sets, they were not able to fully leverage this historical data with their current systems in place. 

With the creation of the BI solution, the customer has a definitive source of data for consumption information. This has allowed each business unit to compare and to collaborate around consistent and reliable data, allowing each business unit to gain critical insight. 

Business units were also previously responsible for their data computation and report generation. SSAS and SSRS have allowed them to reuse reports in a common format with graphical data representations. With the proper usage of business intelligence, the creation time of regular reports has gone from weeks to minutes. 

The following gives insight into the business challenges of this organization and how IDC's custom solution was able to streamline these process. 

Pre and Post Implementation:  

Pre-Solution 

1. There was no single source of consumption history. There were multiple systems that reloaded consumption data on a regular basis making incorrect assumptions on the transactional data. 

2. No ability to compare budget to actual on a consistent and simple basis. 

3. The original process took weeks to align the data. 

4. No ability analyze the actual consumption data. 

5. No ability to drill down on actual data, summarized totals only which limited analysis. 

6. No monthly and no normalized data available. 

Post Implementation  

1. Customer is now able to view a single source of vetted, billed, monthly and normalized data that reconcile to one another and to the source. 

2. Ability to compare forecast to actual data easily. 

3. Ability to use Excel to analyse and drill down on data to spot trends by customer type. 

4. Ability to get a list of actual customers by customer type in minutes, which prior would have taken weeks. 

5. Ability to make informed decisions using data available and to provide accurate historical data to customers. 

6. Ability to provide accurate and repeatable results. 

Technology: 
IDC created an ETL process to load consumption information into a data warehouse using SSIS packages using SQL Server 2008 R2. The data warehouse is used as the definitive source of data for both SSAS data cubes and SSRS reports. 

Technical Deployment: 

The BI solution comprised of 3 major components of SQL Server 2008:  

1. SQL Server Integration (SSIS). Custom SSIS packages were primarily responsible for the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) of the Billed Consumption. They allowed for consistent and repeatable methods for screening and loading the data into the SQL databases.  

2. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). SSAS allowed us to aggregate data as needed for common reports, thus reducing the time needed to present the report. It also allowed us to quickly slice data and present the data via MDX.  An example is to show the aggregated Billed Consumption for 2010 across multiple regions.  

3. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSRS standardized common reports used by multiple business units. Since the SSRS reports used SSAS via MDX queries instead of the SQL databases, the time required to generate the reports improved significantly. SSRS also created a web based access point for the users to access the reports.