“Our customers want to see the global picture. That means our data integration capabilities have to be highly advanced. Using Informatica to integrate data not just from our own resources but from our clients’ own IT environments is creating competitive advantage for AC Nielsen.”

- - Mark Hogan, Director, Business Practice Europe, AC Nielsen Advisory

Services

Fast Facts

Customer

AC Nielsen (Advisory Services)

Challenge

Enhance the global analysis provided to AC Nielsen’s clients of their marketing investments and consumer behaviour.

Information Solution

Informatica PowerCenter

Benefits

• Enhance customer service and generate competitive advantage through the provision of more comprehensive and fully global modelling projects.
• Develop greater customer loyalty through the ability to integrate customers’ own data into the analysis framework and therefore provide more powerful analysis

With capabilities in 105 countries around the world, AC Nielsen is the world's leading marketing information provider. The company provides measurement and analysis of market dynamics and consumer attitudes and behaviour, enabling its customers to better understand competitive performance, to uncover new commercial opportunities and to raise the profitability of their marketing and sales campaigns. Its customers include major organisations in the retail, consumer goods, travel, leisure and financial services sectors. At the heart of AC Nielsen’s business is its most important commodity – data.

The Challenge

AC Nielsen helps its customers across the globe to gain competitive advantage through improved marketing and retailing strategies. Retail tracking and market analysis can be extremely data-intensive operations. AC Nielsen compiles and simplifies this information into actionable reports for its clients.

The markets in which AC Nielsen’s customers operate has long been a global one, or at the very least international. However, producing comprehensive marketing and consumer behaviour analysis that offers a truly global view has until recently been either impossible, or a laborious and imprecise process involving the consolidation of many reports into one.

When AC Nielsen’s Advisory Services group started work on a comprehensive upgrade of its IT environment as part of a general strategy of its parent company, the media group VNU, it decided that it needed to instigate an enhanced data integration strategy that would enable it to gain and sustain competitive advantage. Its aim was to be able to integrate any form of data into its modelling and analysis framework to provide complex analysis for its clients – both internationally by harnessing data from every country in which a client wanted analysis undertaken, and across multiple product lines.

Moreover, the data needed to be both accurate and current, so there was a need to integrate huge volumes of Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) data in the case of consumer goods and food products. With EPOS data added to data on promotional plans, weather forecasts and project-specific information, total data volumes for any single round of analysis undertaken by AC Nielsen can reach a Terabyte. The integrity of that data also needs to be assured so that when it cross-pollinates client information with its own proprietary data, the required level of analysis can be provided quickly and confidently.

The challenge was therefore to enhance the organisation’s data integration capabilities so that it was able to provide the most accurate, most international view of customer behaviour and marketing investment results for clients. The end goal was the most highly detailed and sophisticated analytical reports yet produced, on extensive performance criteria, tailored by product line and market, which will ultimately help AC Nielsen to develop further revenue streams from its client base.

The Solution

“The ability to provide analytical reports worldwide is something that we have been moving towards for several years, but we seized the opportunity to change the way that we do data integration to give us some new powerful capabilities,” said Mark Hogan, director, business practice Europe for AC Nielsen Advisory Services. “We wanted to be able to integrate data from any type of IT environment our clients used themselves, and also their latest sales data and that from our own vast information resources. Being able to consolidate all of that data and use it to provide accurate, reliable and current information would put us several steps ahead of the competition.”

AC Nielsen evaluated several alternative ways of providing the data integration functionality required. Alongside several solution platforms, including Informatica PowerCenter and options from Ascential and Syncsort, it considered hand-coding its own interfaces, but rejected that on the grounds of functionality, development time and ongoing management costs. PowerCenter was chosen because it offered the widest support for multiple data types and offered the architecture and the functionality that AC Nielsen required for its complex, global challenge. PowerCenter also proved its integration capabilities could scale to extremely large volumes of data, such as weekly or monthly EPOS information provided by clients.

“AC Nielsen’s approach to data integration is helping us to set the pace in the fast-globalising practice of marketing analysis,” said Mr Hogan. “Informatica PowerCenter was chosen after extensive consideration because we had confidence that it could integrate our broad array of data types and do so seamlessly.”

”That confidence is critical because we have committed to our clients to analyse their marketing efforts and consumer trends globally and to a deeper level of detail. We need to be able to not just introduce but sustain that enhanced level of service. Informatica PowerCenter is enabling AC Nielsen to dig deeper than ever before into how its customers’ marketing investments are performing, and that benefits our customers - and hence us - directly,” he said.

The Results

AC Nielsen’s introduction of PowerCenter into its IT environment has achieved clear operational and strategic benefits in that new levels of customer services can be offered. “The benefits we have achieved through PowerCenter are significant” said Mr Hogan. “Strategically, this has put us in an enviable position in the market. We are delivering truly global analysis for the first time and at the core of that capability are Informatica PowerCenter’s data integration capabilities. Our clients need to make decisions extremely quickly on what the data we provide on their marketing campaigns tells them. For example, they don’t want to gain analysis on core geographical markets and then have to wait to get the data on other regions. Business is global, products are marketed globally and they want to make single global decisions. PowerCenter gives us the ability to deliver that level of fast, accurate information.”

One of the largest savings will be on the time taken to turn modelling projects around. On average, the company engages in over 600 consulting projects which require modelling and advanced analytics. These are taking approximately two weeks to complete from conception to delivery with 50 per cent of this time being spent on data modelling. With the use of Informatica’s PowerCenter, AC Nielsen will realise a 50 per cent reduction in the time it takes to analyse market data, which equates to a saving of ca. 1,200 working days per annum.

“This investment has had significant operational benefits. We have streamlined our process of compiling information through the introduction of far more powerful data integration. We now have one solution responsible for the way in which we compile and then analyse data across our heterogeneous IT environment, and those of our clients. That reduces risk in that we know what is possible, it reduces our management overheads (around €500,000 a year in external software maintenance alone) and reduces the time taken to get the job done every time we have large, complex analysis to undertake,” he said.