JCDecaux UK
JCDecaux is Europe’s largest out-of-home advertising company; more than 300,000 people in 3,500 of the world’s largest cities see its advertising structures every day. With an exclusive focus on out-of-home advertising, JCDecaux is the market leader in street furniture, billboards, transport and digital advertising. Founded in France in 1964 by Jean-Claude Decaux, the company has revenues of almost €2.6 billion and offices in Europe, North and South America, the Far East and China. Established in 1983, JCDecaux UK has more than 650 employees and now accounts for more than 25% of the UK’s out-of-home market.
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As part of its IT roadmap to support the expanding and increasingly complex UK operation, JCDecaux UK decided to develop a company-wide Business Intelligence (BI) solution. Its aim was to ensure that the UK management team had the information they needed to make better informed decisions – at a strategic and operational level. Essential to its success was producing detailed, accurate weekly reports on the UK’s activities: as well as being able to provide detailed, up-to-date information to JCDecaux’s head office in France. The short proof of concept, conducted by Infobright partner Open Business Associates (OBA), demonstrated that Infobright's column-oriented database, powerful data compression and optimized load capabilities were particularly suitable for JCDecaux’s high data volume needs. JCDecaux selected Infobright as the analytic database for this critical project.
Challenge
JCDecaux UK stored its assets and sales data on three separate databases – one for each large format advertising, street furniture and airports - its three key business areas. “All the management and operational information had to be extracted using Business Objects or produced in Excel and Access” according to Raj Rajkumar, JCDecaux’s Financial Systems & BI Manager. “As we had no common information bank to draw on, we had to spend hours gathering information from scattered data sources. Reports were often produced in different formats using different data sources, processes and methods. Over time, we’d seen our users developing their own complex reporting options to provide the data they needed. Reporting had become very inefficient, it took too long and didn’t meet our business needs.”
Given the complexity of our business and the sheer volume of data, it was obvious that our existing solutions just weren’t a viable option. We had millions and millions of lines of data, so making any changes was difficult, time-consuming and took too long. It simply couldn’t handle the volume of data and produce reports inside an acceptable time frame.
- Stephan Lavollee, IT Manager at JCDecaux UK
Solution
Based on the results of the pilot, OBA began implementing Infobright in December 2009. During the three month project, OBA recommended that JCDecaux use Talend as its ETL tool; partly due to its ability to handle complex data transformation logic and also because the product already had a data connector for Infobright. “I’m delighted with the outcome," said Stephan, "data loads that used to take two hours are now happening in 20 minutes. We can now produce the essential reports in less than three minutes, when originally we couldn’t produce them at all. Our users are very happy, because they have the information they need within the timescales and can meet their deadlines.”
I was amazed with the results. Queries which had taken more than 15 minutes using MySQL only took a couple of seconds using Infobright. It handled all our data, we could generate reports easily and it was very obvious, even from this short trial, that it was the solution we needed.
- Raj Rajkumar, Financial Systems & BI Manager
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