Walklett Group and Arrow International
Increase Arrow`s Competitive Edge Through Data Warehousing
ACTION ITEMS

Walklett Group, a leading Information Technology (IT) solutions company in the Mid-Atlantic region, has announced that they are working with Arrow International, Inc. (Arrow) to build a Sales and Marketing Data Mart. Arrow is a worldwide manufacturer and marketer of medical devices that address the clinical needs of physicians and other health care products used in critical care and cardiac care procedures.

"The goal of Arrow's Sales and Marketing Data Mart is to provide selected users with a tool to access historical invoice history for strategic decision making for future business profit and gain," notes Arrow's Manager, Systems & Programming, Jean Wahl. "By offering one source for obtaining this data, the end-users will be able to access it instantly, and thus are empowered with a tool that gives them access to data necessary for strategic decision making for Arrow's future business profit and gain."

Arrow's Lead Programmer/Developer, Carolyn Rhodes, adds that "Access to this type of data allows the Sales and Marketing users to select specific data elements and manipulate the data for complex querying and analysis. Furthermore, the Sales and Marketing Data Mart will ensure that the data to be accessed is accurate, complete and current. And the instant access to the data that the end-users have gained will also decrease Arrow's Information Systems' (IS) requests and allows the Sales and Marketing end-users to be more self-sufficient."

Prior to building the Sales and Marketing Data Mart, Arrow's Sales and Marketing team were using business reports to analyze the sales and financial aspects of their business. These reports were created by querying production systems and merging this information with data provided by a third party vendor. When month end and quarterly reports were run, ad hoc reporting was not allowed. Additionally, the data was located on a legacy system, and therefore was difficult to access and could not be properly analyzed. In short, the way the system was set-up, it would take users too long to get the reports they needed. And the end-users needed to be spending the majority of their time on analyzing the data rather than on collecting the data.

Walklett Group's team, consisting of four Business Intelligence consultants, is working with Arrow to: define and write the business requirements and set user expectations; develop the underlying Data Mart architecture; plan the IT infrastructure; create the logical data model and the database; ensure data integrity and availability (with regard to extraction and transformation); plan the data consolidation strategies; determine the metadata approach; implement the Data Mart; and manage the analysis, the modeling and quality assurance planning, and the training.

"With Walklett Group's Business Intelligence expertise guiding Arrow's Data Mart project, Arrow will be able to build the Sales and Marketing Data Mart at a very low cost and in a short period of time (3 months)," said Walklett Group's President, Thomas J. Walklett, Jr. "Additionally, Walklett Group's advisory role with respect to this project offers Arrow the added value of Business Intelligence knowledge transfer. Therefore, Arrow can use this newly gained Business Intelligence expertise for future reference in their continued efforts to leverage IT for business gain."

As a leading systems integrator in the Mid-Atlantic region, Walklett Group has been delivering information technology solutions to clients for more than a decade. Walklett Group offers project management and consulting services specific to Client/Server Systems, Data Warehousing, Systems & Networking and ERP Applications. Walklett Group's Fortune 1000 client base spans the bio-technology, chemical, financial, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, retail/distribution and utility industries. Walklett Group's unique blend of people, technology and methodology is the foundation for the company's best of breed information technology solutions for strategic decision making.