Scenarios for integrating enterprise data

The following scenarios demonstrate how two organizations used InfoSphere® Information Server Packs to integrate their enterprise data with InfoSphere Information Server.

Life science: Integrating around SAP BW

A global leader in life science laboratory distribution implemented SAP BW for sales, supply chain, and contact center metrics, but still has a huge amount of data on non-SAP systems in areas of enterprise resource planning, financials, and custom applications.

The IT department needs to support the business by delivering key sales and revenue status reports and an analytical workspace to corporate and field staff in a timely way, meeting scalability requirements, easily managing metadata, and moving data from sources to targets.

The company uses the InfoSphere Information Server Pack for Oracle Applications to access financial and accounts receivable data, InfoSphere DataStage® to transform it, and the InfoSphere Information Server Pack for SAP BW to load the transformed data into SAP BW.

The company now quickly assembles data sources, performs data transformations, and enforces referential integrity before loading data into SAP BW. Data is ready faster and the process is easy to use. The business users can react more quickly to changes in their marketplace.

Inventory projections: Incorporating SAP BW

One of the world's leading producers and marketers of lawn care and gardening products needed to minimize inventory costs at its 22 distribution hubs. But without knowing their customers' forecasted demand, the company was forced to carry excess inventory to protect against running out of stock and creating customer dissatisfaction because of lost sales.

Managers realized that if they could collect retail customer point-of-sale and sales forecast data from outside of their SAP applications, compare it to their internal SAP data, and properly load it into SAP BW, they could get a customized view of the data and properly plan shipments and inventory to meet demand.

The company implemented InfoSphere DataStage, InfoSphere Information Analyzer, and InfoSphere Information Server Packs for SAP Applications and SAP BW to collect sales data from customers and then cleanse, match, and load that data into SAP BW.

The resulting information helped the company lower inventory by 30 percent, which amounted to $99.4 million in one year. This savings contributed to a $158 million increase in free cash flow. The project also significantly reduced distribution and holding costs.