For a leading marketing services company, GDI developed an information system architecture to enable integration across divisions and an enterprise data model that substantially improved efficiency and reduced errors.
The Challenge
Client Background
The client, a leader in marketing services, needed to simplify and enhance its management of data across the organization. As the company grew, various business units and users had developed ad hoc approaches to gathering and managing information. Before this engagement, there were 1200+ spreadsheets used to manipulate data and over 300 different audit reports generated for the 300+ applications accessed by more than 500 users.
Project Objective:
GDI partnered with the client to address the business-critical IT need. The main goals for the project were:
- Integrate systems across business units
- Streamline training and improve usability
- Ensure data quality and integrity
- Develop a single source of record for data
- Drastically reduce the number of spreadsheets used for data manipulation and storage
The Solution
Technology Employed:
Rdb, .Net, Embarcadero, PowerBuilder, BizTalk, GDI proprietary data constraint tester
Project Details and Key Responsibilities
- Developed information systems architecture to enable integration across divisions
- Developed an enterprise data model, beginning with a single database and then consolidating the database from each application into the enterprise data model
- Integrated different applications leveraging the EAI tool
- Brought in usability experts to analyze user behaviors for user interface design
- Evaluated and implemented constraints at the database and application levels to resolve data integrity issue
The Results
The project was successfully delivered on time and within budget.
The new data model is now the core system that supports all applications and its growing number of business users. GDI, its consultants and its management approach achieved the following successes:
- Elimination of 90% of spreadsheets
- Elimination of all audit reports
- Data is entered once and then used by different applications, resulting in:
- easy integration
- consistent information
- ability to analyze trends
- reduction in redundancy and data entry errors
- Applications now support an integrated workflow across business units