Sigma’s Enterprise Data Warehouse

Sigma’s management had identified several key areas of focus to reinvigorate its business, including: anticipating and innovating on-going industry change; investment in retail brands, warehouse infrastructure and supporting systems; and strategy for profitable growth.

There was a lack of a scalable and flexible centralised single source of truth within Sigma’s Data Warehouse Architecture. This was obstructing alignment with Sigma’s business strategy in terms of support for current and future strategic business objectives, such as an integrating Point of Sale (POS) from pharmacies, and compliance reporting for Community Service Obligation funding.

Sigma was unable to capture and integrate intraday data changes from the source systems, and there was a lack of integration with data held externally, such as POS and loyalty program data. There were also data inconsistencies as a consequence of manual and error prone point solutions from multiple disparate sources. It was recognised that Sigma’s Data Warehouse software was outdated, leading to these significant performance issues.

Sigma envisaged that its future strategic business initiatives would rely more heavily on its Business Intelligence systems and its underlying Data Warehouse. Sigma requested EC Integrators (ECI) to provide a proposal to design and build a Data Warehouse Architecture that followed best practices and was fit-for-purpose to support both Sigma’s current and future business objectives.

ECI understood that Sigma required an enterprise wide Data Warehouse architecture that was flexible and scalable, and that would provide a solid foundation to align with the company’s focus to re-invigorate Sigma for growth.

Over two stages, ECI built a Data Warehouse for Sigma, addressing the company’s information challenges, specifically:

• The lack of a centralised single source of truth to enable evidence-based business decisions;
• Lack of timeliness of data and poor Business Intelligence system performance;
• Manual, error prone Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence management processes; and
• Old, unsupported Data Warehouse technology and infrastructure.

ECI successfully completed Sigma’s Data Warehouse in two phases. Sigma’s Group Business Information Manager, Winnie Wong says “on behalf of Sigma, I would like to thank the ECI team for delivering the Sigma Data Warehouse Project. It has been a challenging journey, but your professionalism, dedication and expertise has enabled us to reach one significant milestone after another.”

Of the end result, Winnie says “it is a strong platform that we can start to utilise and build on. We have learnt a lot from this project and it wouldn’t have been possible without your ongoing guidance, knowledge sharing and patience. Words alone is not sufficient for me to express the deep gratitude that we have.”