Financial Services Provider Powered By A New Data Warehouse

Company Background

As one of Europe's largest automotive financial services providers, our client is focused on providing financial mobility with compelling financing, leasing, insurance, direct banking and professional fleet management services for domestic and international clients. Inforte's SAP Services practice shared its experience in defining and implementing a business intelligence strategy and data warehouse architecture consistent with the existing business strategy at this financial services company.

The first step to implementing this architecture was the migration of the existing mainframe-based data warehouse to SAP BW, resulting in an anticipated ROI of 2.5 years due to reduced operation costs of the data warehouse. In addition, new application development costs could be cut down significantly by utilizing an integrated data platform. Inforte's SAP Services practice put forth its competence to design and implement the new data warehouse based on SAP BW from scratch.

Business Issue

Due to the rapid growth of the company in both business volume and product offerings, a substantial improvement of analysis and reporting capabilities was deemed necessary. The existing data warehouse, a mainframe-based solution, did not cover the growing need for flexible business intelligence services. Isolated data pools, redundant and non-consolidated data from various disparate applications and a highly heterogeneous IT landscape, all required a significant amount of resources and represented tremendous challenges for the implementation of a new data warehouse solution.

Inforte's Solution

The key component of the new data warehouse architecture is a data warehouse layer with about 120 ODS objects and more than 1,500 InfoObjects. In this layer, data from various operational systems is cleansed, integrated, historicized and stored on the most granular level.

On top of this layer resides an InfoMart layer with 35 InfoCubes to produce all reports that have been available with the former mainframe solution. The data warehouse layer is fed by an extraction layer that receives and transforms data from more than 100 different interfaces. In this architecture, any new application can rely on consolidated data provided by the data warehouse layer. Tedious and time-consuming efforts to implement extraction and integration procedures are eliminated, thus reducing implementation cycles and project costs considerably. As a side benefit, cross-application reports with an enterprisewide view are made available as the data warehouse layer provides data covering the full range of business processes.

With this layered architecture, Inforte provided a highly effective solution that loosely adheres to the corporate information factory (CIF) paradigm proposed by Bill Inmon, which is a widely accepted framework for modern data warehouse design. Inforte established a framework for further development of the data warehouse at our client that might well be used in the context of Basel II or in other challenges that the company soon may face.

Business Benefits Delivered

Inforte implemented a new data warehouse solution and migrated existing data with a small team in a fast-paced project. The new data warehouse, based on SAP BW, provides integrated data for current and future reporting requirements and is able to absorb a data volume of several Terabytes, which is anticipated for the next few years. As a result, our client can now rely on a solid central platform for enterprise-wide information management and is poised to take the next steps to continue its rapid business growth and success.

Inforte's SAP Practice offers industry-leading, proven business intelligence services that allow SAP customers to strategically analyze information and accurately forecast for optimized operations, better customer service and improved bottom-line performance.