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OTTO made its name as a classic mail-order catalogue. Since then, it has progressed to become the biggest German online retailer for fashion and lifestyle (B2C). Transformation into an e-commerce driven company requires the information flows to be considerably speeded up. The high degree of flexibility and the options available for the overarching, general optimisation of the sales offer require detailed, fast knowledge of customers’ purchasing behaviour and of the success of marketing campaigns. The easy way in which information can be combined is becoming increasingly important in this field.
The large number of customers, items and campaigns carried out at the same time generates a huge quantity of data. This presents an extremely valuable wealth of information for adapting the range of products to fit the requirements of customers. The IT systems used to date were no longer able to keep up. OTTO chose BI technology by Microsoft and, therefore, a high-performance, easily adaptable overall concept which is intuitive to operate.
Only standard components based on the SQL server were used: however, they were compiled in an impressive configuration with six integrated servers with a total main memory of 12 terabytes. The additive indices such as turnover are realised in a multi-dimensional approach which offers top performance for this type. In general, semi-additive indices, such as the number of individual customers in a certain period, prove extremely performance-critical. They have been realised in a ROLAP model with columnstore indices. In the analysis services, both models can be combined in a cube.
Thanks to this solution, the OTTO divisions are able to take new paths in the field of customer management and e-commerce analysis and, in category management, to analyse the existing information basis at any level of detail. They are no longer reliant on IT for the creation of analyses and newly combined indices: instead, they work independently with familiar front-end tools such as Excel with access to the cube data.
The resulting solution with considerably increased functionality is now not only significantly more stable and better performing than the old one but also noticeably more economical – both in its procurement and in its operation. In this manner, the Microsoft SQL Server is a permanent fixture in the BI platform strategy of OTTO.
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