Summary
Rubix Consulting worked with Grande Cheese Company to develop a new enterprise-wide business intelligence solution using the Microsoft BI technology stack. With this new solution, Grande now has a platform that will increase adoption by end users, is easy to use and maintain and reduces the total cost of ownership.
Client Profile
Grande Cheese Company was founded in 1941 and is based in Brownsville, Wisconsin. The company produces high quality Italian cheeses for independent restaurants and pizza shops throughout the United States. They offer a variety of aged and fresh products including mozzarella (pizza cheese), provolone, parmesan, romano, white cheddar, ricotta and fresh curd. Grande Cheese Company also includes a Custom Ingredients Group that creates exclusive whey products that deliver innovative benefits in a variety of custom, natural foods and beverages. Grande Cheese Company has a home office in Lomira, Wisconsin. Its manufacturing and distribution facilities are in Brownsville, Fond du Lac, Friendship, Juda, Rubicon, and Wyocena.
The Technology Challenge
Grande used Business Objects as a Business Intelligence platform for many years and wanted to move to a platform that would reduce the cost of ownership, increase adoption by end users and would be easy to use and maintain. Grande chose the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform.
The Rubix Consulting Solution
Rubix Consulting took the Grande BI vision and worked with their IT team to turn the vision into reality. Grande was already using a Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 as a collaboration platform. Rubix Consulting, together with Grande’s IT team, designed and built a solution that would build upon the Microsoft technologies already in place to reduce licensing and integration costs. The work included designing and building dimensional models, relational data marts, OLAP databases (CUBES), creating Report Models, creating SharePoint 2010 sites, creating reports, creating Excel Services, pivot tables and pivot charts, and PerformancePoint dashboards to deliver the information to the end user. Rubix consulting also provided Report builder 3.0 and Excel Services training for business and power users.
The Business Intelligence solution included the following components:
| 1. |
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 RDBMS to host the relational data mart (Star schema) |
| 2. |
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS) packages and SQL Server Job to extract transform and load data into the relational data mart and regularly process Analysis Service Cubes |
| 3. |
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services (SSAS) cubes which contained KPIs, Hierarchies, Role-based security, and calculated measures using MDX. |
| 4. |
Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports. |
| 5. |
PerformancePoint 2010 dashboards including scorecards KPIs and charts. |
| 6. |
Microsoft SharePoint business intelligence sites. |
The Results
By choosing the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, Grande Cheese Company made significant savings on licensing cost because the solution was built using SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010, two software platforms that Grande Cheese had already owned. With the user training provided by Rubix Consulting, business and power users are now able to easily build reports using familiar and easy to use tools, like Report Builder and Excel, and publish these reports to SharePoint where the rest of the user community can easily access them. This Microsoft BI solution made information accessible because business and power users can now build the reports they need within hours instead of waiting for weeks to get a report done with Business Objects. The new Microsoft BI Solution is easy to maintain, especially that it was built on top of Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint server; platforms that are robust, mature and the IT department at Grande already have in-house expertise to troubleshoot and correct any issues that may come up.