by Patric Helmaan

To record the name of every 3M product, one at a time, you'd need 50,000 Post-it^®Notes. To jot down all the SKUs, you'd need half a million.

Lahr at large Title: 3M's Manager of IT Data Warehousing Number of 3M products in his desk drawer: Too many to count Favorite color of Post-it note: Yellow Education: Bachelor's degree in Organizational Management and Communications from Concordia College Hobbies: Playing guitar, watching his children play sports

3M has been one of the world's most widely known corporations for a century, celebrating its 100th birthday on June 13, 2002. That's a lot of history and continued growth, resulting in a 21st-century global powerhouse with more than 40 business units and in excess of 71,000 employees.

It's an organization that generates, analyzes and uses enormous amounts of data. Since the introduction of the Teradata-housed 3M Global Enterprise Data Warehouse (GEDW) five years ago, the company has been using information in ways that fulfill and exceed the business promise of centralized data operations.

Overseeing much of the implementation, deployment and ongoing expansion of 3M's GEDW is Mark Lahr, manager of the company's IT Data Warehousing Department. He recently spoke with "Teradata Magazine" about the advantages of centralized data operations and the distance 3M has traveled since beginning its GEDW program in 1997.

Q: Prior to implementing your GEDW, what was the data and decision support situation at 3M?
A: Before the consolidation of our information, we had a variety of decision support systems of various kinds all over the company. We faced thousands of monthly extractions from different machines in different environments throughout the company. There simply wasn't the computing power in one environment to provide a consolidation point for our information.

Add to that the fact that we were wrestling with the ongoing consequences of decades' worth of technological innovation and evolution, business expansion, product introductions, legacy systems, lingering and different versions of business models, incompatibilities that resulted from acquisitions and more. It was not a small challenge.

Q: But the consolidation had larger goals than "just" centralizing data, correct?
A: Absolutely. Still does. Our information consolidation was guided from the beginning by business goals and designed, implemented and deployed to the maximum benefit of the overall enterprise. We're guided by the business rules as defined by 3M, but also by the awareness that we're in a variety of different businesses around the world. 3M fields 40 business units across six markets, ranging from the familiar consumer and office products to health care, specialty materials and industrial products. We make and sell a wide variety of products including pharmaceuticals and other drug products, dental restoratives and adhesives, orthodontic appliances, ferroelectric liquid crystals, high-temperature ceramics, large format graphics, sandpaper and telecommunication products. Not all of the businesses operate in the same way or with the same business model. Retail is different from industrial products, for example.

As a consequence, we were faced with thousands of monthly extracts from different systems operating in different environments—generating a variety of different answers to the same business questions. Multiple versions of the truth, as it were, almost as though our various divisions and businesses were separate com-panies, telling separate stories, tracking separate reporting histories, all of it in a global business environment that was itself undergoing rapid and volatile change.

Q: Faced with such a situation—such a diversity of situations, actually, resulting in an equally diverse cascade of challenges—how does a company decide what to do first?
A: This is where being absolutely clear about the business goals is crucial. The fact that we were faced with so many versions of our information actually helped define a clear goal: one version of the truth, for all concerned. Whatever the technical solution, that particular business goal has to come first.

Q: That seems to be not just a "philosophical" point—everybody talks single vision—but an actual, delineated business goal. A specific target?
A: The specific target. And one supported by a variety of other business objectives. That is, our pursuit of the "single version of the truth" also has to deliver measurable ROI. In 2001, 3M launched five Performance Initiatives. As part of our everyday business processes, these initiatives drive improvements in our productivity and efficiency and help us focus even more strongly on customer solutions and growth. Hence, we don't do any project that does not provide ROI.

Q: And the centralization also revealed enormous cost-reduction opportunities?
A: Revealed and generated them. Indirect Cost Control is a large initiative here, the search for savings not directly associated with our products or capital equipment. These include supplies, freight, travel, maintenance and repairs, utilities and so on. And these can be reviewed level by level, identifying costs that we're able to reduce without impacting the quality of our products, services, employees or customers.

Q: The results?
A: Huge. In 2001 alone we generated over $350 million in worldwide savings. In 2002, we continue to achieve significant savings in indirect cost.

Q: So the implementation generated benefits that flowed in any number of directions throughout the company?
A: Sure, but it's important that we look at how and why these benefits came about. Our GEDW is more than a sophisticated "warehouse." It's an active warehouse, directly related to our day-to-day businesses. No matter how single your version of the truth, it loses business value the farther it gets from real-time and the more removed it is from actual business usefulness to the people in the business.

Q: Meaning?
A: The very consolidation of information into a single, consistent structure gives the warehouse enormous flexibility in responding to requests for extractions from a variety of perspectives, requirements and presentations. High levels of normalization and load optimization speed the inputs, while our applications layer is designed to make the data easily accessible to the people who need it most in formats most effective for their purposes. In many of our production jobs single-step data loading eliminates staging, enabling multiple daily loads where necessary and dramatically reducing transit time from origination points to the warehouse destination table. Which means that business information enters the system, is transformed into consistent foundation layer data and is made available at the speed of business. Fundamental structural consistency also enables exceptional suppleness and flexibility in applications: New applications can be introduced without changes to the data structures.

Q: What are the key business drivers that guide how you make data available?
A: Material available to our users includes cross-business-unit information, product data, global supply- and demand-chain information, SKU rationalization, indirect sales information, global price comparisons and far more. Indeed, there may be as many benefits flowing from the warehouse as there are individual users taking advantage of its capabilities. 3M employees and business partners particularly appreciate the Web-based output. Information is not only available—it's presented in the language of business, not IT.

In the box Database: Teradata V2R4.1 Servers: 32 node NCR 5150/4850 MPP Storage: 15TB LSI Disk Array Storage Operating System: UNIX MP RAS Utilities: Teradata Load Utilites MVS, UNIX, NT Tools: Business Objects, J2EE, Websphere

Q: All of which lets the business side get on with doing business?
A: Exactly. This is a huge analytical tool, providing huge business advantages, continuously yielding competitive advantages, operational excellence, as well as cost savings throughout the company. 3M is built around clear and precise business rules, but it also understands that retail business is different from health care, which is not the same as industrial products and so on. The ability to extract, drill down and format data into information and formats effective for the different needs of the different markets has resulted in large contributions to market effectiveness, market understanding and customer satisfaction.

We now have a clear and consistent picture of our operations, constantly expanding and refined across business units, business operating models, customers, products and processes. The hierarchical structure and the ability it gives us to drill down offers tremendous business value. You can start at the top and push down until you actually find and identify the core causes of a problem.This provides a picture that can be shaped in countless ways, providing upper management with overall views, unit leaders with specific details and individual salespersons with focused presentations for specific customers.

Q: All things to all people?
A: Not exactly. One version of the truth, remember. But, yes, if we look at the ways in which our applications layer is able to provide financial tools to analysts, sales information for the sales force and so on, you could almost say that. More seriously, though, the key point is that all of our individual users of the system share the overall goal of increasing the excellence of customer satisfaction—doing business better—but otherwise assume widely differing forms in pursuit of widely varying purposes.

Q: How many users are there now?
A: We're constantly expanding, adding new users throughout the corporation. Today, more than 13,000 of our (70,000-strong) work force are logged into GEDW, a number that continues to grow. Many of those users tap GEDW's resources on a daily basis, with a smaller percentage using it constantly for high-end analytics and metrics. Warehouse information is presented on a corporate Web site.

Q: And those day-to-day uses also provide a sort of "crystal ball" effect?
A: Exactly. We're able to spot and isolate trends as they start to develop. Exception reporting has improved dramatically, with the warehouse revealing backorders, slowdowns, problem areas and, critically, potential problem areas.

Having that picture of our corporation's entire mix of business units, products, customers and history provides our executives and managers with a foundation for anticipating both new opportunities and potential problem points and bottlenecks. Because of the immediacy of the warehouse information, potentially troublesome individual situations or larger looming trends can be identified and addressed before they get out of hand.

Q: Why did 3M select Teradata for its GEDW?
A: Well, our goal of course was perfection—flawless inputs and outputs, no downtime ever, infinite processing capacity. The same things everybody dreams about! But we knew that those just might be too large a set of goals for our warehouse.

Particularly crucial was (vendor) support—and support availability and accessibility.
One of the things that attracted us to Teradata was its local approach to the testing and review processes. Teradata was the only company that came in and ran full tests with local resources in the prescribed amount of time. Every piece of every test was performed with local Teradata Professional Services.

That gave us a lot of confidence in the company's local resources and the ability of those resources to respond quickly when needed. Things happen, downtime occurs. And when they do Teradata support resources and responsiveness keep problems to a minimum

Q: Any advice for others considering —or dreaming—about creating a GEDW of their own?
A: You have to focus relentlessly on the business rules and goals that guide your organization. The business has to come first.

By focusing on the business rules and models that drive the organization's ongoing success and continued growth, constantly seeking and finding new ways to extract, analyze and format business data, we've been able to provide a foundation for a more seamless integration of data into the organizational operation than would have been possible even a decade ago.

In short, the warehouse supports and enhances the business—on the business's terms and needs, rather than the business formatting its information to the requirements of the technology. While that is certainly made possible by technological and software advances, the technology is not the story that's most crucial to the people who, finally, fund it.

Q: And you do have to deal with the people who fund the warehouse?
A: You could say that. (Laughter.) It's a substantial investment.

Q: But it's more than just a case of building cost-justifications?
A: Much more. Because it's not about justification, it's about return. An effective data warehouse operation proves itself constantly, but its managers also have to put in place constant and ongoing reviews of every aspect.

Managed properly and presented properly to management, the enterprise warehouse will be perceived not as an aspect of a necessary but too often vaguely understood "IT initiative." Rather, executives will be able to look at quantifiable results—and the operational excellence achieved throughout the organization that, in turn, generates those results. They will then not only see the potential of the warehouse, they'll understand what a global warehouse really is. And see the savings it identifies, the efficiencies it creates, the direct return on investment, the ability to spot and foresee trends and so on.

Q: In short?
A: A data warehouse is a business enablement tool.

Q: And for 3M, the GEDW has enabled ...
A: An immediate, accurate, holistic and global portrait of one of the world's largest and most diverse corporations. You can't do that with little data marts. T