lngenico started collaborating with Bl specialist, Kohera, to ensure everything ran smoothly. Kohera worked together with lngenico’s Bl team to set up the data warehouse and detailed pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. “We implemented the so-called Analysis Services tabular models with in-memory technology to be able to search huge amounts of data. This new development makes it possible to process massive amounts of data faster than ever before,” explains Frederik Vandeputte, Managing Partner for Kohera.
The data warehouse is a filtered and enriched copy of the lngenico transaction databases. The latest data is added every night and processed further so that reports can be created quickly. No confidential information protected by privacy legislation or sensitive information enters into the data warehouse. Guillaume d’Ansembourg: “The reports are very detailed, but completely anonymous, so our employees cannot see any secure personal information or payment details.”
Kohera is a new provider for lngenico, but the collaboration has been excellent since the start. Guillaume d’Ansembourg: “The people from Kohera are very practical, pragmatic and flexible. We didn’t spend ages thinking about the structure and all the various definitions; we just got started with it when the time was right. Of course we encountered all sorts of obstacles along the way, but we finished the project in the space of just three months, which is fast for a Bl project. The atmosphere within the company was always great because everyone wanted better reporting. There really was a good dynamic and everything ran surprisingly smoothly. The team spirit was one reason why this project was such a success.”
Work efficiently with Microsoft products
Even though the lngenico’s umbrella organisation works with SAP, Microsoft tools were chosen for this Bl project. “lt was a logical extension of what we already had,” explains Nicolas Sonnet. “We did the analysis and spoke with various consultants, and Microsoft was clearly the best solution because we use Microsoft SQL Server for our transaction database and Microsoft SharePoint for our intranet. All this software is synchronised perfectly, and Microsoft products are very accessible too; you can connect them to all sorts of other tools and software without any problems.”
Pivot table magic
Nicolas Sonnet: “Our average user now just opens Excel, makes a connection to the data, and a single pivot table is displayed. Most of our people already knew how these pivot tables work, so no extensive training was necessary. Product managers can now, for example, look up where a product is making profits, what’s happening with the sub-products, which types of trader are doing well in which countries, and which aren’t! They can then create their own report in a matter of moments, before emailing the Excel file as an attachment to a colleague to continue working on it. We’ll share everything via Microsoft SharePoint eventually.”
lngenico wants to expand the system further to its branches in Germany and France. Guillaume d’Ansembourg: “We’re thinking about implementing it there too so that we can compare with each other. We’ve got clients with payment terminals is stores abroad too, and we want to combine these offline and online transactions in the reporting.”
