Dollond & Aitchison Focuses on Red Brick for First Data Warehouse
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Dollond & Aitchison, one of the UK's leading opticians with over 400 branches nationwide, has succeeded in implementing a high-performance data warehouse which will hold details of 24 million transactions on an NT server which cost less than GBP 9,000.

Red Brick's relational database management system software, a component of the company's Red Brick DecisionScapeSM environment of products and services for data warehousing solutions, was chosen because, according to a Red Brick news release, it consistently showed a significant performance advantage over a similar Oracle system. It also meant a drastically lower hardware investment than is typical for data warehouse software from other vendors, which can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The new warehouse enables Dollond & Aitchison's management team to analyse information in ways which have never previously been possible, so that better decisions in key business areas can be made. For example, by querying the warehouse about the success of promotions in specific stores in specific areas, promotions can be stopped or extended based on results and hard facts. Managers can retrieve this information without needing to involve the IT department.

"With the knowledge we can gain from analysing the data in the warehouse, we can set up and manage trials in a much more intelligent way," said Alisdair Luxmoore, marketing director. "There is now the potential to change fundamentally the approach to many of our marketing activities, lowering costs and maintaining or improving on their success."

The data warehouse records all the components within a single sale -- such as frames, contact lenses, solutions and sunglasses -- and is set up to enable basket analysis, which means that individual analysis can be done on components of a sale.

The system has been loaded with information on all 1997 and early 1998 transactions and is now fully deployed, with data being uploaded weekly from each branch. Some 24 million transactions are expected to be on the system by the end of 1998.

Red Brick's database product, Red Brick Warehouse, was chosen in preference to Oracle on the basis of superior performance, according to Paul Smith, IT Director. "The initial results of the comparative tests on Red Brick Warehouse were so good we didn't believe them," he explained. We tested it three times before we were convinced the performance was consistently better. The warehouse has taken only eight months to complete and we have maintained performance as the volume of data in the warehouse has risen."

Nick Kellet is managing director of Next Action Technology, the systems integrators and Red Brick partners who implemented the warehouse. He commented, "Dollond & Aitchison needs a detailed level of analysis and reporting to make the most of system, and we've supplied this using AnswerSets to allow users to pre-select relevant data and store their selections as Answer Sets in Red Brick for use by Business Objects as the client query and reporting tool. It's a perfect complement to Red Brick Warehouse, and the package as a whole is ideal for Dollond & Aitchison's requirements."

Red Brick's expertise and innovative, server-integrated technology deliver scalable decision support solutions for data warehousing, data marts, OLAP and data mining. Red Brick is based in Los Gatos, Calif., with 290 employees worldwide and FY97 annual revenues of approximately $43 million. Information about Red Brick is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.redbrick.com

Dollond & Aitchison is one of the longest-established high street opticians, founded 250 years ago. The company is owned by Europe's third largest optical group, Vantios plc, and employs 3,000 people, including 1,000 opticians. Last year the company dispensed around 1.4 million pairs of spectacles and carried out over 1 million eye examinations.