Ardo decided to embark mid-2016 to implement a comprehensive Business Intelligence program. The main initial objective was to allow the business to conduct datadriven analyses and decisions related to sales, purchase and inventory across the organization at both a group and a local level by implementing a single source of truth, allowing data enrichments in the future.
A group data warehouse with the ability to report consolidated information on inventory (including snapshots), sales, purchase, budgeting and production planning for all units was build. The biggest challenge was to bring the data of all units, using appr. 12 different ERP-systems, into one data warehouse. To achieve this goal a common format was arranged in which local entities would deliver data to the group datawarehouse. This entire process is driven through a configuration database that will manage what and how data is loaded. The local data loads are consolidated and loaded into the group datawarehouse. The data is enriched with centrally driven Master Data and other external sources. The end result is pushed to Analysis Services cubes that are used for reporting. From a technology point of view, the ETL is done using TimeXtender, the database and reporting platform is Microsoft SQL server.
Today Ardo can report on data which is only 1 day old -company wide and despite the very different source systems- while in the past the consolidation of all data took almost a month. Next step for Ardo is to add the data from the different Warehouse Management Systems to the group data warehouse and to integrate data from a new Microsoft Dynamics 365 (cloud ERP) implementation.
