GEORGIA PACIFIC

Georgia-Pacific is pursuing an aggressive corporate initiative to double its revenue every seven years. Much of this growth will occur through acquisitions. The ability to integrate the data and systems of acquired companies into the Georgia-Pacific data warehouse is vital in order to ensure accurate information and steady progress toward aggressive growth targets. 

The company has long made use of data warehousing to address the issues associated with integrating, cleansing and standardizing the data of many disparate systems. However, the existing data warehouse was suffering from age and growing pains. Among other issues, it was experiencing poor performance, was difficult to use and was reliant on IT resources to maintain key reference data. Clearly, a replacement was required!

Georgia-Pacific engaged RDA to revamp the legacy data warehouse application with a new architecture built on the latest database software. The solution delivered new capabilities including the ability to compare forecasts to actual sales, analyze profit to cost ratio, and manage supply chain capacity and operations.

Analysis services cubes were developed to support dash boarding and detailed data analysis for sales, finance, customer service, inventory, and supply chain operations. The solution architecture was designed for accuracy, scalability and flexibility so that it will grow with evolving business needs.

The new data warehouse solution was designed specifically for the business users. This allows for faster integration of newly-acquired companies, in addition to providing expanded reporting and analytic capabilities. What used to take several months can now be accomplished in 3-4 weeks.

Cost savings have also been realized by sales and finance with the satisfaction of recurring reporting requirements. This eliminates a reliance of the business users on the IT department. The new solution provides business users the opportunity to successfully transfer and preserve critical institutional knowledge from original data architects and managers.