Case Studies: Professional Services

Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, RedPrairie has been helping companies better manage their warehouses for more than 30 years. Although about 95 percent of its customers used to deploy RedPrairie solutions using the UNIX operating system, the trend has reversed in recent years with now more than 70 percent asking for solutions running on Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 operating system. RedPrairie needed to ensure that even its global customers—processing some 500,000 order lines per day—could run their warehouse management solutions using Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database. The company tested SQL Server 2005 and found it could support loads of more than 550,000 order lines per hour, it was executing up to 11,000 Transaction SQL (T-SQL) statements per second.

Acosta provides retail sales and category management services to more than 1,000 manufacturers, including giants such as Clorox, Heinz, and Nestle. To better manage its information, Acosta created a 2.2 -terabyte enterprise data warehouse based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) SP2, and hosted on an HP 9000 Superdome computer with 12 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services was used to create more than 50 client-specific multidimensional databases. Deployments of the enterprise data warehouse and multidimensional databases are providing Acosta with a number of benefits including rapid ROI through product differentiation, better data view for clients, easier data management with Table Partitioning, enhanced performance with Dynamic Management Views, and 70 percent faster aggregations.

CROSSMARK helps the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry refine marketing efforts by gathering vast amounts of point-of-sale (POS) information into a data warehouse. As the company prepared to expand its biweekly POS data loads from 300 million rows to 4 billion, it needed a more robust extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution and an easier-to-use reporting solution. It upgraded its data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. CROSSMARK replaced its Business Objects reporting application with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, the data warehouse, which has grown to more than 3 terabytes, handles the 12-fold increase in data loads without expanding the loading window and gives the company a better view of its business