Imperial Tobacco

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Up-to-date, accurate and richly analysed performance information

The challenge

Imperial Tobacco Group (ITG) has grown rapidly over the recent years through acquisition of new brands and expansion into new territories.

ITG is a large and complex enterprise facing many challenges, particularly in the area of their information systems.

Within ITG, there was a great diversity of local business systems plus inconsistent codification and treatment of common classes of operations data. This gave rise to considerable pressures in the timely assimilation and utilisation of cross-divisional and group information critical to various levels of management.

The solution

There was an explicit need for a Data Warehouse system containing cross-divisional and corporate information from which Strategic Business Units and Sales Divisions could readily obtain up-to-date, accurate and richly analysed performance information.

A key requirement was for a suite of powerful, comprehensive, flexible tools with a simple and consistent web-based user interface.

IPL was selected as sole contractor carrying out the role of project manager, developer and systems integrator.

IPL's brief was to define and implement the technical environment needed to 1) extract information at periodic intervals from several operational systems, 2) process and structure the data, then load it into a structured, shared database to give consistency with other data sources and 3) make the data widely available with appropriate tools for subsequent query, reporting, multi-dimensional analysis and visualisation.

ITG had identified many applications of the latter facility, the first of these being corporate performance reporting for directors and senior managers of the Strategic Business Units and Sales Divisions.

The movement of sensitive financial and trading information across the world was a key aspect of the solution. ITG's preferred transport mechanism was its corporate intranet, enabling access at any ITG desktop anywhere in the world. This meant that security and reliability was especially important in IPL's solution.

The highlights

The Data Warehouse system is operational and the Performance Reporting application has been rolled out to ITG's trading divisions Worldwide, contributing greatly to management control and operational efficiency.

IPL subsequently developed two further applications of the Data Warehouse. The largest of these was a Product Data system to manage the ingredients used in the manufacture of each brand and the many variants required for different countries. The system provides ITG with ‘what if’ analysis on manufacturing recipes to achieve regulatory compliance in different territories, and automates ITG's ‘duty of disclosure’ reporting.

The other IPL development was an Environmental Health and Safety system to monitor manufacturing emissions and energy efficiency, and to report on ITG's H&S obligations in each country.