Mail-order giant expands data warehouse

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Otto Group, the world’s largest mail-order business, has announced it is creating an active data warehouse to drive more efficient operational processes.

The owner of brands including Freemans, Grattan and ParcelNet is expanding and enhancing its existing Teradata platform, currently primarily used for customer relationship management (CRM) processes.

The retail and services group has been building the company wide database since 1989 to create a standardised view of its business. And the platform’s data is also used for procurement, logistics and financial reporting, such as income statements and statistical internet analytics.

The mail-order giant said it was working with the platform provider to adapt the system to specific service oriented architecture (SOA) requirements, with new hardware and software, enhanced service levels and data management utilities.

By providing historical data from the data warehouse in the very short time intervals required for the management of integrated business processes, Otto is also looking to avoid data redundancies and evaluate its corporate data independent of specific applications.

Dr. Wolfgang Linder, Otto Group head of IT and logistics and member of the executive board, said: “Centralised data storage in an active enterprise data warehouse paves the way for implementing our SOA concept and controlling business process in an active and result-oriented manner.”

Building out this concept included the administration of strategic and operative analysis software in a single system, enhanced workload and database management and improved data replication. In addition, new features have been implemented to increase platform availability and database performance.

Linder added: “The demands that we place on our data warehouse have grown significantly over the past few years. At the same time, the highly scalable [data warehouse] technology has displayed high performance and availability under extremely demanding conditions. Teradata handles continuously mounting volumes of data and supports mixed workloads, even when large numbers of users simultaneously access the system.”

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