Acumen Solutions

Partner Settlements Data Mart
Global Broadband, Media and Internet Company

Business Challenge

In order to expand their marketing reach and sell additional services, this Global, Broadband, Media & Internet Company has relationships with many retail and OEM partners. Every month, payments are made to these partners for recruiting qualified, new members. The Partner Settlements process currently faces many challenges and extensive manual work due to inadequacies in the supporting settlement applications. These issues include:

• Manual accounting controls do not meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.
• Trending data and profitability metrics are not readily available to account managers or accounting, limiting their ability to monitor and understand the partner relationships they oversee.
• Account managers must make ad-hoc requests for historical partner payment data, which often require extensive manual research to complete.
• Monthly payment reviews are time consuming and error prone.
• Partner payment data is only available through printed statements that can be hundreds of pages in length.

Solution

Acumen Solutions developed a Data Mart for the client’s Partner Marketing and Accounting groups that gathers detailed partner contract, approval and payment data for display in easy-to-use, web-based reports. Each month as partner payments are calculated, the Data Mart application retrieves data from the source application databases, aggregates the data, and loads it into the Data Mart database. Users can then view the data on the web through a series of reports that display partner payment data at varying levels of aggregation. Users can further customize the reports by filtering and sorting data, performing simple calculations such as sums and averages, and exporting the reports to Microsoft Excel for more advanced analysis. In addition to the monthly data feed, five years of historical data was converted into the Data Mart for use in historical analysis.

Acumen Solutions provided a complete solution for their client. The project began with a short assessment phase in which Acumen Solutions consultants quickly gained a working knowledge of the existing Partner Settlements systems, processes, and issues. This was followed by a requirements gathering phase, which culminated in the delivery of complete system requirements for the Data Mart project. During the subsequent design phase, Acumen Solutions consultants produced a detailed design of the system including system architecture details and report screen shots. The system was then developed based on the design and finally underwent extensive testing during the QA and UAT phases. At the conclusion of the project, Acumen Solutions professionals deployed the system into production and trained the 60 + business users of the system.

In addition to the final Data Mart system, Acumen Solutions delivered a series of documents to the client to ensure they were kept up to date on the project progress, were aware of any issues and risks that could impact the project schedule, could verify the system being built matched expectations, and that the system met IT standards and would be maintainable in the future. Each phase of the project ended with the delivery of a document and review with client business owners, QA staff, and IT Operations.

Return on Investment

The project was an immediate success in the Partner Marketing and Accounting groups at the client. The Data Mart enabled the following business objectives:

• The monthly payment review process became faster and more reliable as lengthy paper preliminary partner statements were replaced with the electronic Data Mart reports.
• Business users accustomed to long waits for historical partner payment data are now able to quickly gather data on their own, increasing their understanding of the partner relationships.
• The Partner Settlements Data Mart project was the only Sarbanes-Oxley IT project at the client that was completed successfully, on-time, and on-budget before the client’s Sarbanes-Oxley deadline.
• During QA testing, Acumen Solutions consultants went beyond the scope of the project and identified several irregularities in the partner payment data that needed review and correction.

Technology/Business Expertise

Acumen Solutions leveraged its extensive technology experience and business expertise in the successful completion of this project including the following technologies and processes:

• Acumen Solutions’ Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process
• Business reporting using Business Objects
• ETL processing using Ab Initio and AutoSys
• Database design and creation using Sybase and DBArtisan
• J2EE Web application development using Java, Apache Struts, BEA WebLogic, and Java Server Pages