Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Scalable Data Warehouse Helps U.K. Lifestyle Group Consolidate Multiple Data Sources in Just Three Months
Overview
Country:United Kingdom
Industry:Entertainment
Customer Profile
Ministry of Sound is one of London’s best known dance venues, and one of the biggest club brands in the world. It has built a lucrative business selling club related products from an e-commerce Web site.
Business Situation
A lack of integration across Ministry of Sound’s data sources meant that the information was frequently unreliable. Consequently, Ministry of Sound was unable to use this information to develop reliable marketing programmes, resulting in missed revenue generating opportunities.
Solution
Ministry of Sound turned to Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner IMGroup to implement Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005. The scalability of the solution lets it consolidate several data sources into one central data warehouse, analyse that data, and translate the findings into profitable marketing opportunities.
Benefits
Improved Customer View Boosts Marketing Opportunities
Product Integration Reduced Overall Development Costs
Project Completed in Just 12 Weeks
Visual Studio Offers Improved / “We know what our business is—we’re dedicated to the promotion of dance music entertainment. SQL Server 2005 includes lots of new technology, but in the end it comes down to this—SQL Server 2005 lets us sharpen our focus in pursuit of our business goals.”
James Bacchus, Chief Technology Officer/Head of Operations, Ministry of Sound
Ministry of Sound has evolved from a small dance club in South East London to become one of the world’s most recognizable brands in dance culture, and one of the leading entertainment companies in the United Kingdom. The organisation has become synonymous with the country’s vibrant and energetic dance music scene. During its 15-year history, Ministry of Sound has expanded its revenue streams to incorporate not only nightclubs, but also recordings, tours, licensed products, and events. Each of these business areas feed back a wealth of customer information that the group uses to plan marketing campaigns and target potential customers. However, a lack of integration between these sources meant the group was unable to fully exploit the data it was receiving. With Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, IMGroup providing technical expertise, Ministry of Sound deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 to consolidate its data sources and provide the rich analysis and reporting functionality it required to gain a more accurate view of its customers.
Situation
With its origins grounded in the London dance music scene, Ministry of Sound has grown to become one of the most popular entertainment companies in the country. Founded 15 years ago as a South London nightclub, Ministry of Sound became home to a generation of new DJs and a haven for house music fans throughout the 1990s. Today, the group’s global franchise has expanded to include recordings, a worldwide network of clubs, tours, licensed products, and events.
Each of these revenue streams is capable of relaying a vast amount of customer information back to the group’s central database, which it uses to analyse consumer trends, plan future marketing campaigns, and develop new product lines.
Unfortunately, a lack of integration across these data sources meant that the customer information Ministry of Sound was receiving was frequently unreliable and full of duplications. This fragmented approach to data capture had left the group with four key areas of concern:
• Marketing and sales staff could not rely on the accuracy of the data with which they were planning their campaigns. This was increasingly impacting profits, as potential customers were slipping through the net and marketing strategies were failing to resonate with their target audiences.
• Duplications, caused by identical customer information being fed into the database from different sources, were causing delays and headaches. The group’s analysts were wasting large chunks of time sorting through a quagmire of data, rather than employing their skills to produce informative reports for the marketing and sales teams.
• Ministry of Sound’s IT architecture was struggling to manage and store an ever-growing volume of data. This was compounded by the fact that much of this data was originating from disparate sources that lacked a common data language or format. The group feared that a system crash would seriously impact short and long term initiatives.
• A lack of integration across the different areas of the business had resulted in disparate methods of reporting, ranging from manually compiled spreadsheets to electronic feeds into the database. This meant that consolidating and cleaning the data was increasingly difficult and time consuming.
Ministry of Sound turned to Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner IMGroup to help streamline its data management systems in order to create an accurate picture of its customer base and a more reliable and scalable IT environment. Furthermore, the solution had to offer user-friendly analytical capabilities that Ministry of Sound could use to track product performance and identify trends and purchasing patterns across customer groups.
Solution
The project’s success lay in the ability to rapidly cleanse the existing database of duplicate entries, before integrating the numerous data sources into a new, highly scalable database and deploying industry-leading analysis and reporting tools to provide access to relevant data.
As the technical partner implementing the project, IMGroup recommended Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005, as it believed that this was the only solution that could adequately deliver against all of Ministry of Sound’s requirements.
James Bacchus, Chief Technology Officer, Ministry of Sound, says, “We needed a solution that would integrate easily, saving us time and money. The other systems we considered would have been more expensive to deploy and operate, so SQL Server 2005 was a good choice.”
Fuzzy Logic Speeds Up Data Cleansing Process
Prior to transferring the existing data to SQL Server 2005, IMGroup had to remove the large quantity of duplicate information that had built up in the legacy system. Filtering this data could have been a complex and time consuming task that would have added time and expense to the project. However, IMGroup was able to employ the fuzzy logic capabilities of SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to accelerate the procedure.
Fuzzy lookup and fuzzy grouping help developers to combine and use multiple attributes of a target. Using fuzzy logic, IMGroup’s developers had a framework for building a robust data-cleansing solution. Suranjan Som, Senior Information Architect, IMGroup, says, “We used fuzzy logic and fuzzy grouping tasks within SISS extensively. By doing so, we were able to successfully match customers with double entries in databases.”
Ministry of Sound can now determine a customer’s marketing potential based not only on musical preference, but also on other lifestyle choices such as the music festivals they attend or leisure activities they pursue. This enables the company to compile a more complete picture of a customer or group of customers. This is invaluable in terms of successful marketing.
Prior to the introduction of SQL Server 2005, Ministry of Sound lacked any kind of data warehouse. Instead it held its customer data in multiple databases across the organisation.
This caused numerous problems, including:
• Locating specific data in a timely manner;
• Manipulating the data into reports;
• Different database formats meant the data was difficult to consolidate;
• Some data was stored in third party databases held by partner companies. This data was stored both as text files and Microsoft Access files, making it difficult for Ministry of Sound to convert the information into its required format and further hampering timely access to the data.
IMGroup created a new data warehouse for Ministry of Sound that consolidates all its data into a single customer view. Running on a server with a 3.2 GHz processor and four gigabytes of RAM, the new database is one gigabyte in size with approximately 40 tables.
Visual Studio 2005 Integration Accelerates Data Transfer Stage
Having cleansed the data and delivered it to the more scalable SQL Server 2005 data warehouse, IMGroup then had to ensure that new data being fed into the data warehouse would be accurate, duplicate free, and validated.
“We used [SQL Server 2005 Integration Services] to integrate the multiple data sources,” says Bacchus. These data sources included non-standardised spreadsheets where information was recorded and stored in different ways, and information held by partner companies in different formats and stored on a range of systems. Bacchus says, “SQL Server 2005 provides a much more complete development environment than previous versions of SQL Server. For example, the greater transparency of data helps us to make more modifications that will accommodate a new data source, but will not disrupt the existing data loads.
“It is easy for us to see exactly where changes have been made. Because Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system is fully integrated with SQL Server 2005, it is easy for us to develop solutions that let us see how data is loaded and watch that data being transferred from the source as it travels through the processing stages.”
For the developer, this equates to less time spent tracking changes and debugging code; for Ministry of Sound overall, it means a faster implementation with the associated cost savings.
Benefits
Using new features in SQL Server 2005 such as Integration Services, IMGroup delivered a solution that met Ministry of Sound’s criteria in just three months. Previously, changes on this scale could have meant a year-long project. In just 12 weeks, the power of SQL Server 2005 helped IMGroup to:
• Cleanse the existing data.
• Create a new data warehouse.
• Transfer the existing data into the new data warehouse. This required substantial reformatting as each system had its own country convention, for example GB for Great Britain, AU for Australia. The integration features of Integration Services proved extremely valuable for this purpose, saving Ministry of Sound time and money.
• Integrate multiple data sources, including non-standardised spreadsheets and information held by partner companies on various non-Microsoft systems.
• Provide a rich and complete view of each customer.
• Future proof the solution to guarantee a standardised customer profile using tools such as Data Mining.
Consolidated Data Sources Increase Marketing Opportunities
Undoubtedly, the primary benefit of the SQL Server 2005–based solution is the fact that Ministry of Sound now has a complete and accurate view of its customer base, all housed within a single data warehouse.
Bacchus says, “This greater view of our customer buying habits lets us optimise the impact of marketing campaigns, create new revenue streams, develop cross-marketing opportunities across the revenue streams, and improve profit margins.”
Looking to the future, the group intends to use data mining to explore data and identify buying patterns in even more detail. The data mining component of SQL Server 2005 differs from traditional data analysis in that it lets the user ask ‘why’ a customer does what they do and, equally importantly, ‘how’ they are doing it. In the past, the group’s analysis teams had been limited to merely asking ‘what’ a customer was doing.
“It gives us a much greater insight into our customers’ needs,” says Bacchus. “We intend to use data mining to identify the attributes of our best customers and then look for new customers who hold similar attributes. We can take a more pro-active approach to our business,” he adds.
Visual Studio 2005 Saves Time and Lets Developers Maximise Their Potential
The cost of the Ministry of Sound project was substantially reduced, because SQL Server 2005 is packed with developer-focused features, and integrates so easily with other Microsoft products such as Visual Studio 2005. Bacchus says, “The [SQL Server 2005 Integration Services] functionality makes the acquisition cost extremely reasonable as compared to other high-end data integration tools. Through tight integration with Visual Studio 2005, the cost of development and maintenance is also significantly reduced in comparison to other similar tools.”
Rapid Three Month Development
Functionality, such as the Unified Dimensional Model and Integration Services, ensured that IMGroup cleansed and consolidated the data sources in far less time than would have been the case using a solution that wasn’t based around SQL Server 2005.
Bacchus says, “Without the rich functionality of SQL Server 2005, it is no exaggeration to say that we might still be rolling out the solution today. A three month timeframe for a project of this scale is breathtaking. There is no doubt that we have been able to substantially reduce our expenditure for the project as a result.”
“We know what our business is—we’re dedicated to the promotion of dance music entertainment. SQL Server 2005 includes lots of new technology, but in the end it comes down to this—SQL Server 2005 lets us sharpen our focus in pursuit of our business goals.”
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it’s part of Windows Server System™, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments.
For more information about SQL Server 2005, go to: