Panasonic - Data warehouse case study

Chapter 6: Case Study
2. Business performance and ability to execute its strategy
Panasonic product offerings and business operations spanned across the globe with several manufacturing units, sales divisions and administrative offices located in various countries and regions. Panasonic’s worldwide operations with fragmented office units each with its own IT applications that worked discretely from the rest of the company resulted in their product and customer data being inconsistent, duplicate and or incomplete
The different sources and versions of data impacted operational efficiency negatively and the company had to spend a lot more time and money to deal with these data inconsistencies.
Prices of new technology offerings and products decrease over a time and in order to maintain profit margins it was very critical that Panasonic reduce operational costs and increase sales growth.

For a successful product launch all of the product data such as product photo, manuals, pricing data and point of sale marketing information have to be rolled out with high accuracy, consistency within short time periods.
Data movement through legacy systems, fax machines, e-mail, phone calls and regular mail made data management vulnerable to inefficiencies and inaccuracies.

The current disparity in its organization, application systems and data management caused greater time and effort to create data for launching products globally which gave an advantage for competitors to infiltrate markets and eat into the potential Panasonic customer base.


3. Panasonic decided to follow a single source data repository system for its enterprise by implementing master-data-management (MDM) software from IBM’s Web sphere line of system. MDM software aims to merge disparate records into one authenticated master file. MDM helped to fix discrepancies among the databases used by various departments, consolidate data as well as systematize the business processes related to the data.
The service layer of the MDM maintains the integrity of the master data and synchronizes updates to the master file.

The deployment of the IBM MDM software paid dividends within its first year and half. Panasonic was able to get products to the market faster and spend 50 % less time creating and maintaining product information. Time to market for a product was reduced from five to six months to one to two months. Panasonic Europe improved its efficiency by a factor of 5 and anticipated sales increase by 3.5 %.