with Southern New England Telephone Company

The Custom Business Group (CBG), a business unit of Southern New England Telephone (SNET), markets the company's telecommunications services to high-volume corporate customers. As you might expect, CBG understood that its efforts would be greatly enhanced by easy and instant access to historical client data.

While much of the information was available from a marketing data warehouse maintained by its IT department, CBG's goal was to expand the scope of the data pertinent to its business. By extracting a subset of the data from the existing warehouse, adding data from other source systems, and bringing the data closer to the end user, CBG would be able to gain application efficiencies and streamline queries. So, as part of a company-wide reengineering program, CBG obtained approval to build a local data warehouse, where it could store marketing information and make it instantly available to all of its employees.

A One-Stop Solution
After talking with a half-dozen companies, including Informix, AT&T Global Information Services, and several software development houses, CBG chose Oracle and Oracle Services consulting to build and implement the system. "Oracle offered the system plus all the development and support services we needed," explains Ann Esposito, MIS manager at CBG. "We found that database vendors could build the system, but they lacked applications expertise. Likewise, applications companies didn't have the know-how to build the database."

Another decision factor was Oracle's Marketing Data Warehouse Quick-Start Solution, which offered a pre-built data model for rapid development and implementation. It promised to cut implementation time in half, and no other vendor had anything like it. "The Quick-Start solution specifically addressed CBG's needs in the telecommunications industry," says Sam Waicberg, Oracle account manager, "providing them with a fast, low-cost solution."

Half the Usual Implementation Time
After evaluating the pre-built data model, CBG found it matched their needs very closely. Work began in May, and Oracle's consultants had the data warehouse in full production by September. "It took five months to put this in place," says George Missios, Oracle Services managing principal for SNET. "That's not only about half the time usually required, it's about half the cost." Esposito adds, "The rapid deployment reduced our expenses for resources and customization. But even more importantly, it enabled us to get a critical system online much more quickly."

Increased Efficiency, Improved Service
CBG's new marketing data warehouse is performing fully as expected. Instead of spending hours and days tediously collecting marketing data, a salesperson is now able to instantly pull up a full roster of relevant information on his or her PC--while still on the phone with a customer.

This immediate access has made a difference. As Esposito relates, "One manager, on the phone with a client, pulled up the billing records and saw no revenues for the prior month. The manager checked later on, and found that a newly purchased contract had somehow fallen through the cracks. Our people were able to correct the problem the same day, before the customer noticed anything amiss."

CBG staffers are very comfortable with the easy-to-use Developer/2000 icon-driven interface. And they're excited about the forecasting application custom-built for them by Oracle consultants. Users can now quickly create detailed sales and income projections on their own, without having to go through MIS. Managers can generate ad hoc queries for the critical data they need, right when they need it, for more timely, well-informed decision making.

Building on Success
CBG's database is currently 10 gigabytes, representing a year's worth of information. The warehouse will double in size with the addition of a second year of data, and new applications are expected to expand it still further. 1997 will see CBG's sales force equipped with remote-use capabilities. The Personal Oracle7^TM database is being considered to facilitate this, enabling salespeople to download information from the marketing data warehouse and upload their new data later.

The success of CBG's database has not gone unnoticed. Says Esposito, "With the other business units in this corporation involved in their own reengineering efforts, senior management is very interested in what we've achieved with this system." It seems that CBG's marketing data warehouse is just the beginning of SNET's success story with Oracle products and services.