Having decided to bring even more valuable strategic and tactical decisions, the GETRO management and specialists for sales tracking and control, made a demand from the IT department to provide them with the fast and accurate way to access data that is related to sales, store and the products flow within the company.

As the company expanded, the amount of data and time to serve customers (users) became critical for present resources in IT department, meaning the users' demands have overgrown capacity of the IT department.

Although production processes are covered by ORACLE/Unix platform, analyzing the offered solutions IT department decided to implement DSS system based on exclusively on Microsoft® Windows® platform. Back end of the system is Microsoft SQL Server™ 7.0 and Microsoft OLAP Server, and front end is an OLAP client SoftPro Manager 2000.

Main reasons for such decision is scalability of Microsoft SQL Server along with other integrated services, above all DTS service which provides gathering data from many heterogeneous data sources. Microsoft OLAP Server has proven as the right choice when a data-warehouse system is needed for storing and analyzing a vast amount of data.

Client package SoftPro Manager 2000 showed itself as an exceptional solution compared to other OLAP clients. The package is designed as a "flip-side client" which on one hand gives plain and simple approach to basic functions and on the other hand it consists of advanced functions meant for power users who want to execute complex actions and analysis of data warehouse.

On-line access to corporate data
Each and every user of data-warehouse system can get any information about sales and supplies at a given moment. The situation prior to the implementation of the data-warehouse required a set of actions to be performed to accomplish a given task. Users would give tasks to their IT department, which then prepared reports. Making these reports could take several days. IT department usually spent 7 to 8 hours to complete more complex task and now a user can interactively get most of the information in few moments without the help of IT department.

Lower TCO for IT department
Company's IT department became overloaded with the way they were working so the new system cut down human resources needed to accomplish the very same tasks. Most of the time, IT specialists were involved with preparing and analyzing reports, nevertheless they had to watch out when they were doing those tasks so they would not overload their production system. Now, every user has interactive access to data-warehouse databases and IT specialists are primarily maintaining data-warehouse system and educating users so they could all be even more efficient.

Enhanced load-balancing of server resources
Previous approach put a significant stress on production servers, which reduced overall performance. As amount of data grew, all more sophisticated tasks that had to be done on the database, would be done after working hours or over night when production database was not under stress. The new system uses existing resources and covers all processes that are using complex queries so the production database is at less pressure. This way, a part of production system load is transferred to data-warehouse system that is working simultaneously with the production system.