Customers

JCDecaux

"To improve our operational and financial performance, we were looking for a dynamic business intelligence (BI) tool that would enable analysts to quickly evaluate the profitability of our billboard sites and compare advertising costs with the revenue that they generated.That is why we capitalized on BusinessObjects and opted for Dashboard Manager."

Patrick Cardinael, director of IT strategies and industrialization, JCDecaux

Volume and Complexity

Each of JCDecaux's subsidiaries had its own information management system until 2001, when the company launched the 4D (Decision Data Delivery for Decaux) business intelligence (BI) project. The aim of this was to develop a standard platform for all the countries and functional domains in which the group does business.

JCDecaux selected the commercial and real estate units in France and the United Kingdom and planned to work with Business Objects, Business & Decision, and CSC to create and set up a data warehouse and data marts.

"However, we soon ran into some unexpected difficulties in locating the relevant information. We realized that the traditional combination of a data warehouse and statistical reports would not do; we needed to dynamically analyze the profitability of our billboards - for example, the ability to isolate billboard populations to monitor over periods of time, define key profitability metrics for these populations, and compute them," says Cardinael.

A Management Portal for the Analysts

JCDecaux Group invested in a corporate data warehouse to give them reliable, standardized, valid data before introducing Dashboard Manager. Four months after the data warehouse had been up and running, BusinessObjects Set Analysis and BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager went live.

With BusinessObjects Set Analysis, JCDecaux can define the dynamic segments of its billboards for a variety of criteria: sites, networks, physical characteristics, profitability ranges, revenue, fixed rent, etc.

With BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, users have a comprehensive management portal to create their own dashboards and profitability metrics, analyze selected populations with Set Analysis, and monitor patterns over time. For example, global profitability metrics can be broken down using geographical and network criteria.

Users can navigate by region or product and, if they want more detailed information, take a look at ad hoc BusinessObjects reports.

More Proactive Management of Profitability

BusinessObjects Set Analysis and BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager are an integral part of BusinessObjects Application Foundation. Already a Business Objects user, JCDecaux wanted to make more of its initial investment in BI.

"The Business Objects analytic solutions and its query and analysis tools dovetail perfectly. Our users have greater freedom. Whether they are implementing dashboard segments or using Dashboard Manager to analyze data, they define their own metrics. Dashboard Manager gets data to mean something more quickly. Our users can query, check, and analyze their data in just a few days where before it would have taken them several weeks. They can pinpoint trends and causes more quickly. This enables them to react more quickly in the dynamic management of their billboards. Ultimately, we shall extend our business intelligence capability to the whole group," says Cardinael.

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