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Success Story: Big Lots!

Success Story

KPI's:

  • 97% reduction of data with archived and nearline technology
  • Reduced time to complete sales queries to 5-10 seconds
  • Improved Sales audit responses to 1 day from 2 weeks
  • Improved sales reporting 200%
  • Reduced data growth rate by 90%

Revenue:
$5.19 billion

Employees::  
> 35,600

Products & Services:
Retailing

Headquarters:
Columbus, OH, USA

Business Need

Shortly after Big Lots, the nation’s largest broadline closeout retailer, implemented SAP IS-Retail the company noticed that its retail stores were generating a lot of data.

In fact, data was growing two to three times faster than what the company had initially estimated, and would reach 30-40 TB by the end of the year. This incredible increase in data volume was already causing performance problems, which would only get worse over time. Due to the year-round, high pressure nature of the retail business, the company needed to find a solution immediately and it needed to be able to be implemented quickly, during the company’s very short SAP system maintenance windows.

In addition, the large amount of data that was being generated with each retail sales transaction also made it difficult for the company to retrieve data for sales tax audits. The data extraction process was very manual and complex. Each audit inquiry required seven separate steps to extract data from both the SAP BW and the SAP ECC systems. To be able to respond within the 2 week time frame provided by auditors, the company needed to find a better, faster solution for extracting data.

Solution

Big Lots engaged Serrala to help develop a Data Volume Management strategy to control growth of data in the SAP BW and ECC systems, enforce data retention requirements and improve performance. The solution use Serrala's Corestone solutions to provide:

  • Secure, low cost storage for archived data
  • Nearline storage for fast retrieval of archived data for analytics
  • Common infrastructure to support both BW and ECC
  • Fast and easy retrieval of data by users
  • Simplified reporting for Sales Audits
  • Data retention compliance with business requirements

The solution was implemented in phases. In the first phase, the company controlled its data growth by archiving its business complete data. In the second phase, the company addressed the performance issues by adding fast and flexible retrieval access to the archived data and custom reports. The sales tax audit report was created as part of this phase.

Results

The company was able to stabilize data volume growth in both the SAP BW and ECC systems and improve user productivity through faster system performance and elimination of manual steps in reporting. Benefits of the solution include:

  • Stabilized database growth
  • 97% reduction of data with archived and nearline technology
  • Reduced time to complete sales queries to 5-10 seconds
  • Improved Sales audit responses to 1 day from 2 weeks
  • Improved sales reporting 200%
  • Reduced data growth rate by 90%
  • Increased user productivity with faster system performance and automated reporting
  • Satisfied retention and tax reporting requirements

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