Italian Engineering Firm Improves Customer Analysis Capabilities
with BI Solution
(For more information about other Microsoft customer successes,
please visit:www.microsoft.com/casestudies) (Customer: ABB
S.p.A.Website: www.abb.it Customer Size: 5,550 employeesCountry or
Region: ItalyIndustry: Manufacturing—Industrial equipment and
machineryCustomer ProfileABB S.p.A., based near Milan, Italy, is
the Italian subsidiary of ABB, one of the largest engineering firms
in the world. ABB is a global leader in power and automation
technologies that help utility and industry customers improve their
performance while lowering environmental impact.Solution
SpotlightGives employees self-service business intelligence
capabilities, offering more insight into the company’s
business.Presents a unified data view, helping improve customer
service.Provides near-real-time data analysis.Offers flexibility to
deploy mobile applications and other tools as necessary.)
Microsoft SQL Server
Customer Solution Case Study
Italian Engineering Firm Improves Customer Analysis Capabilities
with BI Solution
“Using the SQL Server Power View tool and the BI Semantic Model
in SQL Server 2012, our employees will be able to easily create
multidimensional reports, providing better insight into business
and customer data.”
Andrea Franchi, BI Technical Lead, ABB S.p.A.
ABB S.p.A. is owned by ABB, a global power and automation
company headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. To meet business
demands, ABB S.p.A. needed to give employees better business
intelligence (BI) capabilities. The company also wanted to
consolidate its data to give employees a single view of business
and customer information. ABB S.p.A. is implementing a Microsoft BI
and data warehouse solution that will provide better business
insight and give employees a unified data view. The solution also
gives the company the flexibility to add analytical tools going
forward.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published March 2012
Business Needs
ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies and
operates in 100 countries. The information system (IS) department
of ABB S.p.A., an ABB company located near Milan, assists 5,550
employees with business intelligence (BI) systems, network
management, and other IS services.
In early 2011, as part of a new business initiative, the ABB CIO
started a program to improve information management for ABB in
Italy. A critical part of this initiative was giving employees
self-service BI reporting capabilities so they could gather more
useful data about local and regional customers. “Because of growing
demand for fast business analysis, the Italian business units had a
need for real-time data analysis,” says Fabrizio Bertotto, IS
Application Manager, ABB MED Region. “They wanted to give their
employees a better ability to find out more about business trends,
starting from a daily and near-real-time operational BI analysis.
It was up to IS to create an innovative solution to support
that.”
This would be a challenge, though, because ABB S.p.A. had
different BI systems in place throughout the organization. “Data
for business analysis came from many sources, so we wanted to try
and put it into a single, unified view for the users,” says Andrea
Franchi, BI Technical Lead, ABB S.p.A.
For ABB S.p.A., having a unified solution was also critical for
customer perception. “Our divisions are very different, but our
customers see ABB S.p.A. as a single entity,” says Alberto Iacop,
CIO, Italy and Mediterranean Region, ABB S.p.A.. “And we also
wanted to have a single view of customer information.”
In mid-2011, the ABB S.p.A. IS department started planning for a
new, consolidated BI environment.
Solution
Because it had been using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data
management software and was familiar with other Microsoft
technologies, ABB S.p.A. was determined to find a Microsoft BI
solution. “We’ve been a Microsoft customer for a long time and have
been very pleased with the technology and support,” says
Bertotto.
ABB S.p.A. concluded that Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise
was the right technology for its BI initiative. SQL Server 2012
includes new data analysis features such as Power View, a
self-service web-based reporting tool found in SQL Server 2012
Reporting Services. Power View would give ABB employees advanced
data exploration, visualization, and presentation capabilities.
ABB S.p.A. also wanted to explore the BI Semantic Model in SQL
Server 2012 Analysis Services, a semantic layer placed on top of a
SQL Server 2012 data warehouse that interoperates tightly with
Power View, Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet software, and other
technologies.
In March 2012, ABB S.p.A. will start to deploy Power View and
the BI Semantic Model based on a SQL Server 2012 data warehouse.
Data will be restructured for online analytical processing (OLAP)
cubes both in the traditional way and with the new in-memory
tabular storage mode using SQL Server 2012 Integration Services and
Analysis Services data marts.
Once the new solution is fully deployed, the firm will have a
centralized place for all its analytics information needs. About
4,000 users will be able to uniformly access and analyze millions
of rows of data. The solution will rely heavily on virtualization
technologies and will aim to consolidate eight legacy BI platforms
into a single data warehouse with more than 3 terabytes of data.
Users will also be able to quickly and easily create their own
customer data reports using scorecards and dashboards.
Benefits (Software and ServicesMicrosoft Server Product
PortfolioMicrosoft SQL Server 2012 EnterpriseTechnologiesMicrosoft
SQL Server 2012 Analysis ServicesMicrosoft SQL Server 2012
Integration ServicesMicrosoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting
Services)
The Microsoft BI solution will give ABB S.p.A. employees better
business insight by providing them with powerful data analysis
capabilities and more detailed information. Also, the ABB S.p.A. IS
department will have flexible analytical tools for the future.
Gives ABB Better Business Insight
With its new solution, ABB S.p.A. will give employees
easy-to-use tools for viewing in-depth customer data and building
reports. “Using the SQL Server Power View tool and the BI Semantic
Model in SQL Server 2012, our employees will be able to create
multidimensional reports, which will give us better insight into
business and customer data,” says Franchi.
ABB S.p.A. also expects the solution to provide future
analytical efficiency. “ABB S.p.A. is a leader in the Mediterranean
region, and SQL Server 2012 will help us meet not only local but
regional demands for daily data reporting and share information
among the several companies in the area,” Franchi says.
Presents Unified View of Customer Data
The SQL Server 2012 BI Semantic Model will help ABB S.p.A.
present detailed customer data from different regions in a single,
unified view. “We have very different divisions with multiple
source of information,” says Iacop. “This solution delivers that
information in a consolidated database with a unified toolset.”
Provides Flexible BI Model
The ABB S.p.A. IS department will also have more flexibility.
For example, with the BI Semantic Model, IS can provide a
feature-rich semantic layer on top of its data warehouse. “The SQL
Server 2012 BI Semantic Model makes it easy for us to offer BI
tools in a transparent way to our users,” says Franchi.
ABB S.p.A. can also implement other BI tools as needed. “We
expect to provide more mobile applications or other services,” says
Bertotto. “This solution will give us the flexibility to change
things as we go along to implement the best tools for our users,
while still having the same data assets on the back end. It gives
our employees the tools they need, both now and in the future.”