El Universal makes more accurate decisions after

MICROSOFT SQL SERVER 2000
El Universal makes more accurate decisions
after deploying a business intelligence
solution developed with Microsoft® SQL
Server™ 2000
El Universal is one of the leading newspapers in Venezuela and has been
awarded three times with the National Award in Journalism. Today, this
newspaper prints more than 100 thousand issues from Monday to
Saturday, and 290 thousand issues on Sunday.
Customer Profile
Situation
The history of this company dates back to 1909, in Caracas, when it was founded by the
well-known Venezuelan poet Andrés Mata and the lawyer Andrés Borges Vivas. In 1994,
Andrés Mata Osorio, grandson of the poet and founder, took up the newspaper’s
management and decided to take El Universal through the new technological changes that
impacted all the business areas. It is worth to state that this media became, in 1995, one of
the first to have a Website to supplement its printed version.
Currently, besides from the newspaper, this company has other products. One is a monthly print,
called `Aquista´, which editorial content is of interest for the community and is also a local
purchase guide. Also, four websites: El universal.com (news and information), autofuturo.com
(car market information), porlapuerta.com (information about the real estate market) and
cvfuturo.com (information about the labor market).
Industry: Communication media
Business Situation
Need to develop a business
intelligence solution that would
allow to take the transactional
data, coming from ERP and other
systems of the company, and
transform it into useful information
for the decision- making process.
Solution
Benefits
“Processes that used to take a
week are now done in half a
day.”
Software and Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Microsoft Office 2000
El Universal handles around 1500 subscribers a month, between new and renewals. It also
receives between 1500 and 2000 new classified advertisements, which place this newspaper as
the leader in the classified advertisement business. Therefore, it has a marketing department that
is in charge of measuring and analyzing the acceptance and receptivity of all the products in the
market. This department is located among the top four of the organization, and this is the reason
of its strategic value.
Issue Discussion
In the beginning of 2000, after completing the deployment process of the administrative-financial
modules of SAP R/3 (ERP system), in the IT division of El Universal arose the need to develop a
business intelligence solution that would allow to take the transactional data, coming from ERP
“A lot of time was consumed,
simply in the depuration and
preparation process of the
data to be submitted in the
reports. Thus, the analysts
could not get into a great
detail in the information
analysis to be able to make
more accurate decisions”.
Francisco Disilvestro
and other systems of the company, and transform it into useful information for the decisionmaking process.
One of the organization’s business units with a critical need of information is the Marketing
Division. In order to obtain business trends and compare them with the market information bought
from market analysis companies, such as Datos, CVI and IVP, the marketing analyst prepared by
hand their own monthly reports, integrating the information coming from the advertising systems
with the information of market studies, which process took up to 3 working days.
“A lot of time was consumed, simply in the depuration and preparation process of the data to be
submitted in the reports. Thus, the analysts could not get into a great detail in the information
analysis to be able to make more accurate decisions,” said Francisco Disilvestro, IT manager of
El Universal.
On the other hand, the subscription division did not have an automatic means to generate
affectivity measures. The indicators then were not consistent and had differences with the values
generated by the top management. This is why there was a need to generate consistent
indicators that were adopted as the only ones applicable in the company.
Solution
When the IT system of El Universal submitted for the first time the development of a
business intelligence solution, three or four tools were evaluated, but all of them had very
high costs. “We were trying to look for a solution that with a fair investment, could be
really useful and had an impact in the decision-making processes,” explained the IT
manager.
After studying the functionality of SQL Server 2000 for building “business intelligence” tools, they
choose to use this product to develop the solution. “We had the intention to do something that
had to do with the concept of business intelligence, but we did not know that SQL Server offered
the tools to do so,” said Disilvestro.
The development of the solution took about 4 months, with a part-time assignment, due to the
time limitations both of users and the development team.
In its first phase, the project included the development of two systems for the generation of
business indicators. One for the Marketing Division –strategic business unit, located among the
top four positions within the organization- and the other for the Subscription Unit that belongs to
the Distribution Management. Later, a new system was incorporated to support the classified
adds unit, related to the Sales Division. Each of these systems is a “datamart” that has a loading
and updating process which is stand alone and performs according to the needs of each
department.
The business indicators system for the Marketing Division allow them to automate the data
integration, coming from the advertisement system, the production system (ATES), SAP R/3 and
the reports from market analysis companies, in a data warehouse with consistent information
about market penetration, total sales, consignment of newspapers, return of issues, among other
indicators.
The consolidation of the information in the central warehouse was achieved using DTS, the ETL
(extraction, transformation and cleaning) module included in SQL Server 2000, and the consistent
“Processes that used to take
a week are now done in half
a day.”
Francisco Disilvestro
IT manager of El Universal.
use of the information from different points of view, were obtained through the development of
multidimensional structures, using Analysis Services, the OLAP module of SQL Server 2000.
Also, the subscription datamart was developed, where around 1500 subscriptions are handled,
between new ones and renewals. In this datamart, they achieved to consolidate the information of
customers subscribed to the newspaper, coming from the Mercurio system, with the claim data of
the call center, coming from the Siebel system. Subscription indicators were developed using
DTS and Analysis Services of SQL Server 2000, and the support of Microsoft Excel 2000, as a
visualization tool of indicators.
On the other hand, the datamart of the classified adds allows now for the marketing and sales
supervisors in this department to analyze the claims of customers related to the same
advertisements. “Now,” says Disilvestro, “we are able to handle several dimensions, such as: day
of the week, department responsible of a failure and action taken, among others.” The information
that feeds into this datamart is taken from the classified adds system called Atex Enterprise and
from the Siebel system (call center), which daily handle between 1500 and 2000 new
advertisements.
The loading and updating process of the classified advertisement datamart is ran everyday, while
that of the subscriptions and marketing is once a week and once a month, respectively. For the
loading of each datamart, only 20 minutes are required.
Benefits
Results obtained through the solution:
•
With DTS, the ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Cleaning) module of Microsoft
SQL Server 2000, El Universal developed mechanisms that allow it to reduce the
time used to analyze external data (information bought from research companies in
the market) with the internal data and the depuration thereof. “Processes that used
to take a week are now done in half a day.”
•
“With SQL Server 2000 tools, we have been able to make developments in very
short times and with a modest investment.”
•
“The time that we used to invest in debugging and preparing information is now
used to make detailed analysis and decisions on how to attack the main problems.”
•
With this solution, users of the marketing, subscriptions and classified adds areas
have access to an automatic and periodical system, coming from different
transactional systems, that releases them from the time-consuming report
preparation.
•
With the positive results achieved we were able to motivate the top management to
support even more this types of projects and there are now new needs in the
marketing division and in other units of the company.
•
“Thanks to the datamart, in the classified adds area, now we are more accurate in
determining the cost of mistakes and we can take actions on a timely manner,
allowing us to reduce the amount of problems.”
Learning:
•
“Definitely these solutions, developed with SQL Server 2000, allow to find
differences and inconsistencies in the transactional data and to improve
processes.”
•
“We feel that once you control the theory of what SQL Server does, it is really
friendly to make these type of developments.”
•
“We discovered that it is a tool with many possibilities. We are looking forward to
making a deep analysis to be submitted to the top management, who generally
requests specific data and recommendations from the middle management.”