Case Studies / NEC
Company-Wide Data Aggregation with Dr Sum
Self Service Business Data
Since its foundation in 1974, NEC Nexa Solutions, a core company of the NEC Group, has supported business innovation through system integration. The organisation combines outsourced services, system integration services and platform services to built the best solution for each of its customers.
Despite attempts to introduce a company wide system aggregating sales data, NEC found it was still difficult to understand the status of sales activities, with data split across the sales support systems, as well as various Access databases and Excel workbooks.
The problem was that the data was distributed across many internal systems, and it was impossible to know where the necessary data was.
I wanted to build a mechanism that would allow me to analyse the results as they came out.
Mr. Ryoichi Maeda
In addition to the problem of finding information, there was also the issue of the time it took to generate reports. In some cases, it took 2-3 weeks to generate a report, by which time the information containing in the report is no longer current.
To solve this problem, NEC decided to build a unified data system across the organisation, and for that, NEC employed WingArc's Dr Sum database engine.
Dr Sum for Company-Wide Data Aggregation
The tabulation system implemented at NEC extracts the necessary data from the sales systems and prospect management systems, as well as the core business results systems, tabulates it, and loads it into Dr Sum on a nightly basis, with some additional data loaded hourly. To maintain the integrity of the data, after the batch process completes a data integrity check is automatically undertaken to compare the data in Dr Sum with the original source data.
About 600 sales representatives use Dr Sum to analyse daily sales activities.
About 50 types of sales data and forecast data can be analysed by project, product, and so on. We now have access to all the data we need to truly understand our activities.
Mr. Ryoichi Maeda
Dr Sum’s server licensing model was a key factor in choosing the solution. As Mr. Maeda says, “other BI tools were client licences, which would be too expensive to use for around 2,500 people. Since the aggregation system is a tool that all employees use, the server licence was a major factor for us in selecting Dr Sum.”
More Efficient Reporting; More Reliable Data
The introduction of Dr Sum has significantly reduced the workload of the planning department. Reports that were created by manually collating data can now be generated from the Dr Sum database much more quickly, and the team now have easy access to data that helps understand the situation across the organisation at a glance. The time to release reports has been shortened and the monthly operational costs have been significantly reduced.
Having developed a system that provides easy access to accurate data, the next step for NEC is to investigate data visualisation and dashboarding solutions.
Before
Sales data was distributed across the organisation, making it hard to find the data you need and time consuming to generate reports.
After
The situation of the whole company can now be understood at a glance, with organisation-wide data aggregated into a single source: Dr Sum.