BAT

Parity helps global marketing teams achieve competitive information advantages

Background
Top global companies require fast and accurate market information in order to respond successfully to the different preferences of their customers. However, confronted with many different sources of information, it can often be immensely challenging for marketing departments to quickly access reliable data upon which they can base their commercially-important decisions.

British American Tobacco is a leading global company which sells its brands in 180 different markets. The company serves a very diverse and varied range of customers with a very wide range of brands. In a bid to get closer to its different markets, the company’s central marketing team took the strategic decision to improve the way it captures and manages business-critical brand and market data.

Parity Business Solutions was invited by British American Tobacco’s central marketing team to replace the company’s existing management information system with a new marketing data warehouse. The aim was to introduce a new system which was capable of delivering fast web-enabled marketing performance reports including customer surveys and up-to-date shipments data.

The Challenge
The first phase of this ambitious and complex project involved replacing the legacy marketing system and migrating effectively 30 years of worldwide shipments information to the new data warehouse.

explains Peter Marshall, principal consultant for Parity Business Solutions, who also works in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing.

He says the new system provides key performance indicators and enables the marketing team to interrogate the information they receive to gain fresh insights into the performance of their brands.

During the second phase of the introduction of the new system, additional functionality was introduced to incorporate consumer survey data. This consumer survey data is now undergoing a process of cleaning and correction.

Marshall explains that the new marketing data warehouse required the development of a data dictionary in order to establish common product descriptions which could be standardised and followed by the many different operating companies and research agencies working for British American Tobacco in different locations around the world.
The main components of the technical architecture included an Oracle V8 database and Oracle iAS web server; with PL/SQL application modules and Javascript and Active Server Pages.

Ian McDonald, BAT’s head of Marketing IT said:

The project began as a scoping study and was followed by three implementation phases to address the three main data streams – Shipments, Consumer Surveys (GCS) and Retail Audits (RA). Each data stream incorporates key performance indicators.
Ken Fifield, director of Parity’s Business Consulting, says the approach taken to successfully implement this major project for British American Tobacco illustrates how Parity Business Solutions can successfully help other leading global marketing players to analyse, understand and access up-to-the-minute data on their brands in sharply different market segments.

Fifield says that clean information feeds are essential management tools for international companies in order for them to successfully keep ahead of their competitors in a fast-moving globalised economy.

Parity Business Solutions services include designing, building and operating complete systems which can cover a variety of business functions.

With a strong focus on maximising investment returns, Parity’s experienced and highly-skilled consultants specialise in business intelligence, interactive commerce; customer relationship management; content management; web-enablement; security and applications management; and provide services across a broad and varied range of vertical business sectors.