James McNaughton Case Study

JMC

James McNaughton Case Study


Sales and Business Data Mining System

 


Company Profile

James McNaughton Paper Group (JMC) is one of the largest paper merchants in the UK and Ireland with two UK warehouses and 25 branch offices supplying printers, publishers, designers, screen printers and print and paper buyers.

 

Business Requirements

JMC had a requirement to control it’s margin profitability by analysing real-time reports on the transactions carried out by individual sales staff and their customers, allowing managers to get a detailed understanding of their margin levels. They further wanted this information and results to be viewed by controlled access via an Intranet.

 

They also wanted to improve their Business Intelligence by data mining company databases in order to extract valuable information relating to their customers and products.

 

Our Solution

Beacon consolidated these two requirements by designing and implementing a new database system using the extremely powerful OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) process to provide a fast multi-dimensional relational database. The database system generated data cubes with dimensions for product, customer, seller, period and sales type. The database can also be extended to cater for additional dimensions, for a particular supplier and for over 100 delivery van routes.

 

We added customer dimensioning to around 20,000 JMC customers and 70,000 items for History screens and reports which illustrate sales data for particular products and selling groups. Information can be obtained about various customers, representatives, branches and areas about what has been sold including quantity, sales value and weight.

 

We also added increased functionality to the Market Review screens which provide information about sales and margin figures for around 50,000 sales order per month. This information can be extracted according to each of the sales representatives, branches and areas or for the whole company. The additional functionality included greater reporting flexibility, the ability to drill down to the order item level and adding product dimensioning to the analysis.


 
In order to deliver the integration with JMC’s Intranet, we built the browser-based solution using MS Internet Information Server web server, MS SQL Server, and MS OLAP Server all running over NT. We also ensured the data could be browsed from a PC using either MS Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.