Alinéa relies on the BI technology skills of Micropole-Univers, a European consulting and engineering company specializing in Business Intelligence, e-Business, ERP and CRM, to create its data warehouse.
Created in 1989 in Avignon, Alinéa is the furniture and decoration specialist of the Auchan group. Alinéa currently has 18 stores in operation of 8,000 m² on average, an online sales site, a turnover of 400 M€ and about 2,000 employees. The company's growth objectives are ambitious, with two to three openings per year at the national level and international development projects planned.
Faced with the growth of its business, and in the midst of migrating its management system (ERP), Alinéa is confronted with new information system issues. For example, the quality of the data collected is no longer guaranteed by the current solution.
"Following a needs assessment phase, we decided to build a data warehouse in order to obtain better quality and more structured information that would allow us to perform more detailed analyses. We will also achieve productivity gains," explains Olivier Girin, Head of Management Control at Alinéa.
Dan Fitoussi, IT Project Manager at Alinéa, emphasizes that "the challenge of this project is to obtain better data quality by reconciling information from different operational systems, to facilitate and streamline access to information and to better secure data.
For its implementation, Alinéa placed its trust in Micropole-Univers. Olivier Girin explains: "With Micropole-Univers, we benefited from an experienced and serious team, anxious to provide a reliable solution and with a weighted evaluation method. Moreover, their recommendations in terms of solutions were totally in line with our needs. Finally, the group's reputation also reassured us in our choice.
Edouard Villeneuve, Project Manager at the Micropole-Univers Méditerranée Agency, adds: "Micropole-Univers was involved in helping with the choice of tools, and in particular the choice of the warehouse database (SQL Server 2008 64-bit), the ETL (SSIS), and the reporting portal (IBM Cognos BI 8.4). The objective was to have reports that would allow us to manage Alinéa's teams both at the head office and in the stores.
Once the project was launched last April, the Micropole-Univers and Alinéa teams worked together to define an approach and schedule adapted to the project's strong constraints. After the implementation phase, the project went into acceptance testing at the beginning of September for a production launch in early October 2009.
