Case Studies: Retail

Based in Seoul, Korea, E.Land Group’s Retail Division has become a major force in fashion and discount retailing, partly through its expertise in brand management and merchandising. E.Land Group has four product lines that it sells through 93 of its own discount stores. The success of E.Land Group has enabled it to expand through a number of mergers and acquisitions in recent years. In order to help standardize its operations on SAP ERP, the company decided to move the SAP ERP data from newly acquired properties, which had been running on a UNIX\Oracle platform onto a multi-terabyte SAP ERP database hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Datacenter Edition for Itanium-based Systems.

Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest bookseller, operates 821 stores in 50 states. To help improve its business operations and respond better to customer needs, the company needed new business intelligence tools that could access information faster and provide more detailed reports to managers. The company, which runs Oracle databases for operational systems, decided to deploy a new data warehouse using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 running on an HP Integrity Superdome server equipped with Intel Itanium processors. Today, daily transactional information is loaded faster, reports are available to managers quickly for more insightful business decisions, and the company has a long-term solution that is improving profitability and enhancing relationships with Barnes & Noble customers.

With more than 1,000 stores, Danish Supermarket group is one of Denmark’s largest retailers. To help keep up with customer needs, the company manages more than 10 terabytes of business intelligence data on the Microsoft Application Platform. To enhance its analytics, Danish Supermarket recently upgraded to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Analysis Services for its 600 gigabytes of multidimensional cubes. The company has an additional 9 terabytes of data in its relational data warehouse, which has also been upgraded from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). All of the BI data is hosted on an HP Integrity server computer with 8 Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors. Moving to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services has given the company’s 700 analysts the ability to do product-level analytics of the more than 1 million products carried by the stores.