Tisak BI solution "Implementation of new BI Solution brought us the ability to see one version of the truth." - Delma Čičin-Šain, Tisak Controlling Department. Business Challenge Tisak is the leading Croatian distributor and retailer of daily newspapers, magazines, tobacco products, vouchers for mobile phones and other merchandise. TISAK provides its business partners with a wide array of high-quality services ensuring the safe delivery of products to the customer, with additional marketing services to communicate directly with the customer at the point of sale. Tisak has 2900 employees, more than 950 of its own kiosks and 4300 other sales points. More than 120 million copies of newspapers are distributed each year with more than 250 transport vehicles.Tisak total annual turnover is more than 400 million €. Due to long history of operations in Tisak and expansions into new markets and services, information infrastructure became very complex and heterogeneous that made centralized reporting and analysis extremely complicated task. Implementation of new Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence system was set as high priority and strategic infrastructure project. System is successfully implemented with Oracle database, Informatica Data Integraton platform and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.
Within Tisak currently there are 36 different legacy applications and some of them with multiple instances in different locations. Business Intelligence project was facing numerous challenges. Following targets were set for the project:
Project was concentrated on three main areas of
activity in Tisak – revenue from sales, finance and human resources
as main generator of revenue and costs within the company. Since Tisak is generating a lot of data from retail part of the business, scalable, proven and reliable architecture was a must. Oracle was chosen as a standard platform for Data Warehouse infrastructure. Six most experienced companies for implementation of Business Intelligence systems were invited to submit proposals and after detailed analysis, presentations and scoring procedure, Cognos 8 Business Intelligence was chosen as a platform most capable to deliver necessary, complex functionality. Local Cognos partner Poslovna inteligencija d.o.o. was selected as implementation partner. Project was divided in three phases. Target for the first phase was data from sales and distribution. This was the most complicated challenge in the project due to different nature of products and services that Tisak provides and different and distributed platforms for transactional processing that should be accessed. Data from more that 30 different instances of various legacy systems are extracted, transformed and loaded into consolidated structures in Data Warehouse, modeled with Framework Manager and reported and analyzed upon that model. Second phase covered reporting and analysis in financial area, concentrating mostly on Accounts Receivable, Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss Account. Third phase was concentrated on human resource area analysis, as people who are daily in direct contact with end customers and partners are Tisak’s main asset, as well as main cost generator. “Since Tisak has a very complex and deep organizational structure, security and data access control were one of the main objectives. Cognos 8 security is completely integrated within existing Active Directory infrastructure”, says Sandra Mikuš, Head of IT Department and Project Manager. “Within Cognos, security is enhanced to restrict access to data based on combination of organization, geography and product filters.” Project itself was even more complicated then initially anticipated, so it took few months more to complete than planned, but results exceeds the initial expectations. Delivery of the project was enabled by great and dedicated effort of internal IT resources and business specialists. Business Advantages There were many positive effects that are delivered are documented within the project scope. Project targets were successfully met, mainly in areas of centralized and consistent information access and significantly improved Data Quality, accuracy and availability. The other main benefit was related to organization
and infrastructure. As a result of Business Intelligence project
all vital business data were identified and specified, as a starting
point for implementation of new integrated ERP system. Also, the
project required some new business procedures to be identified
and implemented, as well as some existing procedures are improved
and optimized. Finally, merchandise classification changed in
operational applications in accordance with user needs and one
standard classification is now available for reporting and analysis
throughout the whole company. |
