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New Business Objects suite creates greater operational efficiency for retail enterprises.

When it comes to data analysis, few organizations are as dedicated to examining information as retailers. With this in mind, few relationships are more vital for retailers than the one between the data warehouse, where information is stored, and the business intelligence (BI) tools that make such point of sale (POS), supplier, inventory and other retail data useful.

In recognition of the need to efficiently store, analyze and present retail data, Teradata has partnered with Business Objects to create a joint solution for retailers—Teradata Retail Decisions on BusinessObjects XI.

This retail BI suite features a shared Retail Decisions Physical Data Model that's optimized to work with the Teradata Warehouse and uniquely engineered with the requirements and insights of Teradata's biggest customers.

Teradata Retail Decisions on BusinessObjects XI
Teradata, the most commonly used database platform for large retailers worldwide, and Business Objects, the lead provider of BI solutions for the retail industry, now offer Teradata Retail Decisions on BusinessObjects XI—a broad suite of analytics that forms the foundation of the Teradata Solutions for Retail Portfolio.

Within this solution, Business Objects provides retailers with the comprehensive reporting and analysis toolkit they need to measure performance, pinpoint sources of exceptions and understand the relationships between customers, products, promotions and channels.

As retailers face unprecedented growth in the amount of data they receive and access—and increasing numbers of internal and external customers requiring more information for better decision making—the need to scale without compromising access to information has become critical. Teradata Retail Decisions uses Business Objects products to provide a framework to build queries, reports and dashboards that fit retail business users' unique analysis requirements.

Retailers who have implemented Teradata Retail Decisions have seen improved inventory efficiency (fewer out-of-stocks, fewer over-stocks, improved turns), improved margins (reduced markdowns, more effective promotions), improved space efficiency (less space dedicated to slow moving items) and improved customer retention and wallet share. Using the reporting, dashboards and ad hoc analysis functionality from Business Objects, retailers can now improve performance by better understanding which items, locations and vendors contribute the most to sales and profitability.

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This is an example of an Encyclopedia entry for a report created using Teradata Retail Decisions on BusinessObjects XI. Users can understand the business purpose behind each report, conduct a search of business questions across all reports, browse the glossary and get guided analysis through an information chain from and to this report.

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Reporting within Teradata Retail Decisions can show which products are the most popular with your most profitable customer segments.

How the business benefits
Every retail organization needs a "single view of the business" that's available to, and can be accessed by, all departments in the company. Business Objects makes this possible by allowing business users to ask simple to complex questions and have near real-time access to detailed data.

Teradata Retail Decisions on BusinessObjects XI is designed as a cross-functional solution, which can also be implemented modularly to meet retail customers' specific departmental requirements. This combined BI solution results in improved operational efficiency by enabling executives within operations, procurement, merchandising, marketing, supply chain and IT to make better, fact-based decisions more rapidly than ever before.

The Teradata Retail Decisions analytic solution is based on such major retail functions as sales and inventory analysis, seasonal planning and markdown analysis, vendor performance and profitability, market basket analysis, and customer analysis. With it, retail organizations' business users can now:

	Receive up-to-date information on product performance across the organization
	Gain insight into customers and their purchasing behavior
	Increase promotional profitability and campaign effectiveness
	Pinpoint sources of exceptions
	Improve the ability to measure, manage and improve overall vendor performance
	Provide strategic and tactical reporting templates that enable a business user to analyze product sales information down to the shopping transaction line level

How IT benefits
To stay competitive, retailers gather mountains of data on their customers, suppliers, products and store operations. Now, retail IT departments can look to the combination of Teradata and Business Objects to ensure ease of integration and optimized performance to meet their most demanding requirements.

IT departments will also benefit from customizable templates with built-in metrics that enable more rapid development and delivery of reports and analysis. They'll also save valuable time simply by putting more access to the data into the hands of the right employees.

"Business intelligence is all about getting data out of the warehouse and into the hands of business people," says Janet Wood, senior vice president of WW Partners and Sales Enablement. The company's software spares less tech-savvy managers from the task of mastering structured query language (SQL) syntax. Instead, users build queries by dragging objects around onscreen, a method that's accessible to everyone.

"Say you're a retail marketing manager and you're running a test campaign in two stores promoting a particular brand over a limited period of time," explains Wood. "You want to see how effective your campaign was. That's not the type of information you'd normally see in a weekly sales report. But using BusinessObjects, you can build a query by selecting objects representing the store, product category, and time period and so on. BusinessObjects translates this query into SQL, sends it to the Teradata engine and then returns the answer directly to you.

"BusinessObjects is particularly strong at supporting unpredictable requests for information, while the Teradata Warehouse is particularly good at supporting that kind of analysis," adds Wood.

Technology components revealed
A quick look at the pieces that make up the whole reveals that Teradata Retail Decisions—an analytic solution comprising customizable report templates—is built on the Teradata Warehouse using the Teradata Retail Logical Data Model (RLDM). It also embeds the Business Objects BI suite of products and includes metrics that are built on the Teradata RLDM.

Retailers can use Teradata Retail Decisions to create reports that answer business questions in various critical areas such as sales reporting, seasonal planning, merchandising, promotion, customer, assortment, pricing, vendor and more. By leveraging Teradata's comprehensive data model, retail customers can put solutions to work more rapidly and with less risk than ever before and, using Business Objects, get access to near real-time information about their consumers, enabling them to make better, more strategic decisions.

The value of optimization
Optimized for Teradata, BusinessObjects XI Version 2 leverages and extends the analytics of Teradata Retail Decisions by providing a scalable and flexible information management platform. The result? A very powerful range of enterprise reporting, query and analysis, and performance management solutions.

"Optimization means Teradata does more of the 'heavy lifting,' or deep data analysis so Business Objects can return results more quickly," explains Randy Lea, Teradata's vice president of Products and Services Marketing. "Optimization increases the overall performance of Business Objects and the data warehouse together."

Organizations around the world rely on Teradata's enterprise data warehousing solutions to deliver enterprise intelligence, serving both the strategic and operational decision-making needs of the organization. "We currently have more than 300 joint customers leveraging the Business Objects BI platform with their Teradata Warehouses," says Lea. "A well-architected enterprise information management (EIM) solution is critical to enterprise analytics and managing the centralized EDWs [enterprise data warehouses] our customers rely upon."

Tried and tested
As part of the Teradata Retail Decisions joint development process, Business Objects implemented a subset of the solution—including Teradata's most complicated analytics—and demonstrated query performance that met or exceeded specific performance requirements. Business Objects' performance on this benchmark demonstrates that its BI suite is equipped to deliver the most demanding retail decisions analytics on Teradata.

The Business Objects and Teradata partnership
Business Objects and Teradata have had a corporate alliance for many years and have numerous joint customers, particularly in the retail and telecommunications industry. Business Objects has an active engineering program and a Teradata Customer Advisory Group to ensure its software can take advantage of Teradata features. Together, Business Objects and Teradata deliver solutions that have been validated by more than 300 joint customers, the assurance of accessibility and scalability and reduced risk as a result of joint development and support.

"BusinessObjects XI on Teradata provides a compelling solution for companies looking to standardize their business intelligence deployments," says Teradata chief technical officer Stephen Brobst. "Teradata has worked with Business Objects to tightly integrate and optimize BusinessObjects XI on Teradata, enabling customers worldwide to more easily extend the value of business intelligence to a larger number of users across the enterprise."

About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading BI software company. With more than 35,000 customers worldwide, including more than 80% of the Fortune 500, Business Objects helps organizations gain better insight into their business, improve decision making and optimize enterprise performance. The company's BI platform, BusinessObjects XI, offers the BI industry's most advanced and complete platform for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes Crystal Reports, the industry standard for enterprise reporting. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com. T