AMD Improves Operational Agility with SQL Server 2014 Business Intelligence Solution
AMD, a leading designer and integrator of technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, needed better tools for monitoring manufacturing processes and other business operations.
More than a terabyte of test information was loaded weekly into a data warehouse, which was used by business analysts to run thousands of custom queries. To accelerate performance and handle increasingly larger data sets, the company had implemented Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse in 2011.
The challenge database managers faced was that the data visualization tools the company was using did not work well with Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software and productivity applications familiar to business users.
AMD decided to implement a BI solution based on SQL Server 2014 Enterprise and SharePoint Server 2013. The data warehouse team wanted to take advantage of built-in, self-service BI tools such as Power View, an interactive data visualization feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Reporting Services. Jesse Cantu, IT Director of Data Warehousing and Engineering at AMD, says, “With SQL Server 2014 and SharePoint Server 2013, we saw an opportunity to gain a highly integrated environment that would give end users more control over their data without requiring us to increase the complexity of our architecture.”
The company expects that the BI tools will benefit multiple business processes worldwide, including supply chain management. Faster implementation and accelerated business insight will help AMD improve agility. Matthew Floyd, BI Architect sums up “We can empower employees throughout the company—from power users to people who are unfamiliar with analytics—to create reports. In turn, this frees our IT team to do what it does best, which is enhancing the data warehouse and implementing the latest enterprise BI tools.”
