Here's an old press release from Beacon. I think everybody knows who the customer was. They're still around. I was part of the team that originally got this party started. There are funny old stories we like to tell around that. This was something like 1998 so it was a pretty impressive deal at the time. Interestingly enough, I haven't seen many applications this size in a long time. Now that it's all going to be Oracle, I expect to see some BI smackdowns of ROLAP in the future.
An international retail company needed to track weekly sales and inventory down to a product/color/size combination level for each of its 2,000 individual stores. All together, there are over 100 million store/product/color/size combinations. In early 2000, based on a prototype and on client references, the company chose Beacon Analytics to build this application using Hyperion Essbase as their database platform. The client is using Excel with a customized user interface as the front-end reporting tool.
Business managers need to analyze sales and inventory information by store, by product line down to the style/color, and by week. The application allows the client to better match their product inventory levels to the individual store sales thereby improving inventory turnover. Two major store chains are being tracked. Each store chain tracks about 130 measures, 100 Time elements, 200 Season members, as well as a dozen Fiscal and Price information points. One store chain tracks 1,000 Store Locations and 150,000 Products and the other chain tracks 2,000 Store Locations and 250,000 Products. One store chain also tracks Currency for foreign exchange.
Data is reloaded weekly and made available to over 100 business managers across the country.
Beacon Analytics, Inc. built the application that contains over 500 GB of data running on a Sun 10000 server running Essbase OLAP 5.02. The Essbase model built by Beacon spans 15 physical Essbase databases linked together to form two “virtual” cubes. Each virtual cube represents a single store chain.
Retrieval times for reporting against the 500 GB database are as fast as 3 seconds.
This application demonstrates the scalability of Essbase, and how it can be used for large volumes of data that industry sectors like Retail typically require.
For more information on how Beacon Analytics can help you implement your OLAP-based Business Intelligence solutions, contact Michael Quataert (Quataert@BeaconAnalytics.com) at (973) 366-8351 or visit Beacon’s website at www.BeaconAnalytics.com.
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