Case Studies: Professional Services

The Procurement Finance group at Dell is responsible for providing the Global Accounts Payable Group and management with the tools to track key performance indicators to ensure business objectives are being achieved according to plan. To gain better visibility into invoice discrepancies, Dell created a data mart hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), and accessed through a portal created using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Creating its SQL Server 2005 data mart against Novora and the Accounts Payable dashboards using the Microsoft Application Platform has provided Dell with a number of benefits including enhanced visibility into its procurement accounts payable system, ease of use, 50 percent faster ETL with Integration Services, 9 times faster cube builds, and integrated development.

Germany’s TUEV NORD Group, one of that countries largest technical service providers, offers a wide range of consulting, testing, and servicing activities with its Systems, Mobility, Certification, Energy and Systems Engineering, Academy and International Divisions. The company serves customers in 36 countries in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The TUEV NORD Group needed to replace its 32-bit system with a 64-bit solution. The company upgraded its database supporting the SAP BW to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. The company saw a 15 percent performance increase after upgrading to SQL Server 2005, enhanced availability with Database Mirroring, readiness for 64-bit architecture, and enterprise-grade stability.

Ballard Power Systems, a world leader in fuel cell development, needed to give its researchers faster, fuller insights into manufacturing and test processes and data, in order to cut time-to-market and increase competitiveness. Ballard plans to achieve its goals—including a 30 percent cut in time-to-market—with a business intelligence solution for manufacturing, based on Incuity EMI software from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Incuity Software.

Homestore Web sites provide a national trove of real estate and apartment listings and other housing-related information for more than 9 million unique visitors a month. Believed to be the largest such operation on the Web, the company generates more than U.S.$200 million in annual revenue. To enhance the customer experience, the company created a data warehouse to analyze how its users explore its sites. Initially deployed on a Teradata system, Homestore migrated to a new data warehouse hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™. SQL Server Analysis Services is used for creating multidimensional data cubes, and reporting is done using SQL Server Reporting Services. Migrating to SQL Server has provided Homestore with a number of benefits, including 20 times faster performance in processing Web logs, a richer reporting environment, the ability to provide faster internal customer service, and the agility to meet new needs.

Experian wanted to provide its clients with an innovative. open technology environment that would integrate its capabilities in information, data integrity, targeting, and multichannel communications to enable the delivery of more comprehensive and cohesive solutions. Its MarketOne™ platform makes it easier for Experian to meet the varied needs of vertical industries and the segments within those industries. The MarketOne platform is built on a service-oriented architecture that includes a business intelligence solution based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Web services. The platform delivers the power, speed, and scalability that Experian wants to better meet its clients’ needs for greater visibility into data. Approximately 1,000 SQL Server Analysis Services queries are run against cubes with 10 million members and 200 attributes per member. MarketOne can run these queries at least 500 percent faster than the previous system could.