Case study: Yell

Yell is a leading international directories business operating in the classified advertising market through printed, on-line and phone media in the UK and the US.

Yell creates value by putting buyers in touch with sellers through an integrated portfolio of simple to use, cost effective advertising solutions.

Key to Yell's success is it's suppliers and demonstrating this commitment to working with them to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships Yell has introduced a new, easier to use Purchasing system.

The system uses SAP software to deliver a more streamlined and efficient Purchasing process. It provides them with detailed and up to date information on transactions, tracking of contracts and payments, and allows them to build valuable databases on buying patterns.

To provide for operational reporting, Yell deployed SAP Business Warehouse (SAP/BW) - delivering extensive and detailed views across the Purchasing system.

Despite the extensive reach of SAP/BW, Yell needed to broaden the use of its valuable data for sales and marketing, something that SAP/BW didn't address in the form Yell required.

Looking for an information solution to drive sales and marketing, Yell recognised that the SAP data was far to complex for business users and that a new sales and marketing database would be needed. Yell's business departments were already using a variety of business intelligence tools, but all required a consistent source of data upon which to measure performance and spot business opportunities.

Solution

A project was established to develop a strategic information database for sales and marketing. Group 1 Data Flow ™ Server, data extract, transformation and loading (ETL) technology was chosen to develop all processing of data sourced from SAP/BW and the on-going refreshes of the database.

Whilst data could have been taken directly from SAP, using SAP/BW tables as the basis for development lessened the need to fully understand the complexities of underlying structures of SAP.

Not unlike many organisations implementing SAP, the SAP and SAP/BW data structures were not static, with both systems under development, structure and content would change from time-to-time. Sagent was able to provide the flexibility necessary to implement a solution that could manage these changes in a resource effective manner.

The implementation required the processing of more than 150 tables from SAP/BW, each being converted from its native SAP format into standard SQL, something that was easily achieved in just three processing steps using Sagent. This reinforced Yell's decision to tap directly into the SAP/BW data rather than deploy middleware technologies.

With such high volumes of data being involved, reconciliation with the source system was of prime concern, again Sagent provided the means to compare the values contained in the resultant sales and marketing database with those in both SAP and SAP/BW. In addition, a full audit trail was provided, providing the means to track the database changes.

Finally, the whole solution was fully automated, so no manual intervention was required to update the system. On the rare occasion that there was a data issue, the system automatically notified the IT support team and delivered exception reports to enable a timely resolution.

Information Drivers delivered the Sagent solution, from design through to implementation and training of the in-house IT team so they could maintain and further develop the system to meet future business needs.

Benefits

The new sales and marketing orientated data warehouse, provided access to data, broadening its use by the business and unlocking its value for making informed marketing decisions.

The business had a robust source of information that could be relied upon and up to date each day, in addition Yell's IT staff now had the capability to run, manage and support the data warehouse and its future developments.

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