Background
The executive and line management at the world’s largest toy company, needed sales and forecasting information to support decision-making and empower managers and field salespeople. Since data resided in disparate source systems, there was also a need to present a unified view of critical business information. Clutchpoint was involved in project management, technical architecture, design, construction and deployment of the decision support system. The applications were implemented in a phased manner over a period of two years. This system enabled senior management get a summarized view of their sales and customers across different lines of business. It also provided the field sales-people the opportunity to perform current and trends analysis on their sales and customers.

Architecture
The source systems resided on an IBM mainframe (DB2, flat files), AS/400 (Focus), and UNIX (Sybase). The target data warehouse resided on UNIX (Sybase). Custom ETL code was written to move data from the source systems into the data warehouse. This code consisted of mainframe-based COBOL and UNIX-based C programs, shell scripts and Sybase Transact-SQL programs. The executive information system consisted of a combination of PowerBuilder and Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay Business Intelligence applications.