Web-Enabled Knowledge Management System

The Client

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), a division of Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, is one of the world’s largest credit reporting agencies. The company operates in an expanding worldwide market and hosts databases containing information about more than 57 million businesses in 38 countries.

The Challenge

The client’s customer revenue information was in multiple database systems and in separate international locations. This made it difficult to analyze worldwide revenues and answer questions, such as:

• What are our top performing products locally and globally?
• How do our new offerings measure up to our traditional products performance?
• How does our cross-border business compare to our domestic business?

D&B hired BearingPoint to help it come up with a way to consolidate and analyze data to answer these and other critical questions.

The Solution

BearingPoint responded with a plan to implement a flexible and expandable web-based reporting system for D&B’s global revenue and sales. Our design allows for multiple types of reporting and associated tools, such as sophisticated modeling, detailed information analysis, and standard reports.

An important feature of this solution is an Oracle data warehouse that consolidates business data from dozens of systems in D&B operations around the world. The consulting team and the client’s international marketing and sales groups standardized diverse regional product codes-the product code list shrunk from thousands to less than 100. Using D&B’s own data rationalization process, which included a sophisticated D-U-N-S Number matching process, the consulting team’s solution enabled D&B to consolidate over 1,000,000 unique customers from over 13 countries and 25 source systems. Our team selected Hyperion’s Essbase software to enable multiple users to do fast, interactive data analysis across a number of dimensions, including product, customer, time, geography, and vendor.

The Benefits

Thanks to BearingPoint and the D&B project team, web-based global reporting capability exists at D&B. Marketing managers and senior finance executives have access to consolidated customer data through a direct connection or the company’s intranet. They can analyze customer segmentation, trends, and buying patterns. Analysts save time-and the company saves money-because the new system, not the analyst, does the research and data collection. Now, D&B can clearly understand its customer and product base.