CASE STUDIES
W7 Case:  
Sears, Roebuck and Co. 
W8 Case: 
Trans Financial Corporation 
W9 Case:  
Swissair 
The Information Side of Sears... positioning for growth 

In this session Laura Williams will transport the audience to a growing world class retail business and present its information technology challenges. Sears has an extensive data base of more than two-thirds of U.S. households; Sears Card is the third largest charge card issuer in the U.S. Harnessing this information will benefit the company in its mission of growth.  
Sears Information Management will enable better and faster decision-making, e.g. looking for zones of consumer dissatisfaction, industry fragmentation, and demographic trends for opportunities to better meet customer needs. Critical issues include responsiveness of staff support services and cost efficiencies to the organization. This presentation will focus on the Information Side of Sears, how its architectures are designed, implemented and  managed to enable the company to grow in a prosperous way.

 Managing a Mission Critical Data Warehouse 

Isn’t making strategic decisions for a growing and competitive organization just as important to the organization as posting transactions and updating customer accounts?  If a data warehouse is going to provide decision support for an organization, it is vital that it be treated as critically as operational systems are treated.  In this case study we will discuss how different financial institutions are managing their enterprise data warehouses as mission critical applications.  We will explore in detail how one particular financial institution, Trans Financial Corporation, addresses topics like growing and modifying their warehouse model without impacting end users, executing daily loads of volatile information, automating analysis and information access, proactively using meta data and other mission critical management topics. Trans Financial Corporation is a commercial bank holding company located in the United States of America and is one of several institutions which have successfully deployed mission critical data warehouses.  Please join Mrs. von Hollen and Mr. Jameson as they share their experiences in data warehousing at various financial institutions.

 The session will describe how Atraxis, the IT subsidiary of Swissair, developed a corporate Data Warehouse (1 Tb Data warehouse feeding a 150 Gb data mart) which feeds the Route Profitability Decision system. This is an example of how mission critical opportunities can be developed from data that exists within an organization. Swissair’s Route Profitability System now gives key insights into the profitability and cost drivers of every single flight that takes off throughout the world.- The session will cover: 

•  The architectural design 
•  Source to target mappings and 
 process 
• Logical database designs 
•  Brief demonstration of the    application 
•  Risk Management - the key to    successful delivery 
•  Results to date 

The speakers will be: 
Roger Halbheer, Atraxis Data Warehouse Project Manager 
Martin Baldock, PLATINUM technology - Solutions, Swiss Air Project Manager