Case Study : b3
Asynchrony Builds On-Line, Interactive Reporting Dashboard for E-Commerce Subsidiary of a Fortune 100 Entertainment Conglomerate
Client Challenge
AOL Time Warner, through its e-commerce subsidiary b3, centrally manages all proprietary merchandise sold through 2,000 plus member merchants. Their reporting infrastructure which manages sales, inventory and reporting activity significantly lacked functionality and accessibility for management, sales representatives and merchants resulting in limited information available to make critical decisions.
...we learned more in one day about our business than we have learned in the last three months combined! Based on the results we saw, we have already adjusted our purchases and plans for spring of next year.–one of Warner Bros. VP of Marketing
Our Approach
Asynchrony designed and built a secure, front-end web portal that immediately provided access to authorized members across the globe. To supply the data and OLAP querying capabilities, Asynchrony developed an XML based middle-tier infrastructure to access and retrieve requested data from a dynamic multi-dimensional database.
Once signed in, each member has a personalized user interface which defined their preferred performance .dashboard. view. Also provided was a method for creating and viewing customized reports with point-and-click, drill-down querying capability. Additional functionality included:
- A step-by-step report wizard designed to select data dimensions, making custom report generation and querying simple
- An option to generate reports for immediate viewing in Excel
- The ability to save custom report designs for future use
Results
Within 12 weeks over 500 authorized users were able to access the latest sales information by each attribute defined (sales by store, character, category, percent change, etc.). Information used had immediate return on decision making, evidenced by the following quote from one of Warner Bros. VP of Marketing:
"...we learned more in one day about our business than we have learned in the last three months combined!!! Based on the results we saw, we have already adjusted our purchases and plans for spring of next year."