Aviana Can Help, Every Step of the Way When a food seller needed help because they lost their outside consultant, Aviana was glad to assist. An Aviana consultant went out for a short project intended to document security procedures for the client’s IT staff as well as make a few modifications to existing reports, and completed the work quickly. Along the way, however, the Aviana consultant noticed several issues with the data warehouse and data mart implementation. A number of items did not correspond to best practices. As part of knowledge transfer to the client, the Aviana consultant pointed out these issues. A few weeks later, Aviana was asked to do a far larger project. This project involved updates to Cognos reports, PowerPlay cubes, and maintenance upgrades – all to be done according to the best practices that Aviana identified in the first phase. And, following this multi-month project, Aviana was called back again to implement Cognos Planning. What We DoUnderstanding Your DataA major food retailer faced a classic data problem: How to organize and present data using a single version of the truth.
The retailer had a single data source which, in theory, should lead to the same information being used in the same way. In practice, the retailer’s users pulled data in different ways, leading to different results based on the same data. And, the existing data structure did not incorporate history but rather held only recent data. In addition, the report writing program in use – Crystal Reports – was several years old and had not been upgraded since implementation. At the start of the project, data was loaded once a week, and only current data was loaded (truncate and load). Aviana consultants created a data warehouse and a new ETL process that ran daily. Aviana also loaded historical data to enable trend analysis. The client asked that the ETL process take no more than five hours; Aviana was able to cut that down to three hours. Once the Data Warehouse was loaded, Aviana created an Executive Dashboard and wrote twelve reports for the client. More importantly, though, the Data Warehouse enabled self-service ad-hoc report writing and analysis. By the end of the project, the client had obtained the following benefits:
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