Dorel Juvenile Group
Dorel Juvenile Group is a division of Dorel Industries, a global juvenile products and bicycle company. The company’s portfolio of brands includes Cosco®, Safety 1st®, Quinny®, Eddie Bauer® and Maxi-Cosi® and encompasses a vast breadth of products, including car seats, strollers, high chairs, play yards, monitors and more. As the largest manufacturer of children’s car seats in the world and first to introduce a side impact car seat, Dorel attributes its success to an unwavering commitment to safety and value. Established in 1962, Dorel Industries is a US$2 billion company with 4,500 employees, facilities in nineteen countries, and sales worldwide.
Overview download as pdf
The market-leading product innovation that Dorel’s customers have come to expect demands up-to-the minute intelligence related to sales, financials and manufacturing quality. Sales executives need to see data about who is buying what, in what quantities and when, for instance, or the financial controller might want to examine price variances related to supplier purchases. Getting information into the right hands quickly is critical, and although the company had a BI software solution in place, query response times were becoming a problem. Dorel’s challenges prompted the company to search for an affordable and easy-to-maintain database solution that could deliver fast query performance to meet current BI requirements, and also accommodate the integration and analysis of additional data sources requested by business end-users throughout the organization.
Challenge
As data volumes grew, performance of Dorel's SQl Server-based database slowed to unacceptable levels of performance. One query involving millions of rows of data from Dorel's general financial ledger was taking 24 hours to run. Business users got so frustrated waiting for reports that many of them went back to crunching numbers on Excel. Dorel’s BI team—which consisted of Manager of BI and Data Warehousing Jon Finerfrock and one other employee—found that they were spending at least 50 percent of their time manually loading, integrating and preparing data for analysis. “Neither one of us is a data base administrator, yet we found ourselves constantly indexing and partitioning data tables just to get various ad-hoc queries to run,” said Finerfrock. “As data volumes got larger and larger, managing it all became incredibly complicated.”
Our SQL Server database just couldn’t keep up with the volume. Basic queries were slow, and ad-hoc requests requiring the integration of several sources of data resulted in administrative nightmares.
- Jon Finerfrock, Manager of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
Solution
Instead of hiring a full-time data base administrator or securing expensive new hardware and consulting resources, Dorel chose to implement Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE). Dorel’s first project using IEE was the re-launch of a sales order BI application that had previously been the source of complaints from end-users due to sluggish performance. Another initiative involved making 100 million+ rows of general financial ledger data available for ongoing, ad-hoc analysis. By leveraging IEE in conjunction with Talend Studio, open source ETL software, Dorel was able to load the sales and financial data required in just hours. Working prototypes were tested in less than three days, and the new data mart was deployed in less than two weeks.
Frankly, our selection of IEE was driven by three things: query speed and management simplicity at a price we could afford. This means that the time previously devoted to data administration can now be directed to higher-value activities.
- Jon Finerfrock, Manager of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
download as pdf
Infopliance Portal
Next Steps
Customer Stories
Effective Measure
As a new company whose business is analyzing massive amounts of data, we needed a highly scalable solution that offered all the capabilities and performance possible but at an affordable…
A New Approach
The Analytic Data Warehouse
Traditional data warehouse products put a tremendous burden on IT in order to create and maintain an environment that will allow users to query against large volumes of data.
