Client: The Internet's leading provider of premium, spoken word audio for PC-based listening or mobile playback on digital audio players. The company offers more than 28,000 hours of spoken audio programming from more than 160 different providers.

Assignment: The client's business community looked to their IT team to provide them with an environment that could provide timely information on the following areas of the business:

• Sales - key performance indicators such as audio title sales, hardware device sales and subscription sales on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and year-to-date basis.
  
• Marketing - tracking new customer registrations, membership activity and affiliate referral metrics.
  
• Audit - monitoring criteria such as customer order fulfillment and hardware/audio title availability.
  

Challenges: ACG was charged with implementing a solution that:

• Met the information needs of the business community.

• Provided a powerful Business Intelligence environment that featured ease of use.

• Leveraged the IT workforce without affecting production support.

Solution: ACG met with the client's business leaders to develop a solid project approach that would meet the goals of the project while staying within a tight fiscal budget. The solution entailed the deployment of a data warehouse based on Oracle8i with reporting tools supplied by Brio Technologies. ACG provided the systems/data warehouse architecture expertise and managed the project timeline. The resulting design features an ETL "engine" feeding both a data warehouse and a user focused data mart. The ETL engine is parameter controlled and fully customizable with table driven event management support.

Result: Together, ACG and the client were able to deliver the Business Intelligence solution within budget despite some challenging IT resource issues. The business community now has a tool that allows them to view their data in completely new ways; provided by a high performance data warehouse platform that supplies cleaner, more accurate data. It was immediately recognized that continued use and understanding of the data by the user community would establish a high return on investment for this solution.