BI solution for Sales data consolidation

Hi All

Need help from DW/BI experts on this forum...

I'm an IT Project Leader at a big organization based out of Singapore. We have multiple businesses and P&Ls across diverse industries like consumer goods, construction and healthcare. All of these businesses have their own independent systems for day to day transactions like Oracle Apps, Siebel and a host of legacy mainframe systems. They also have data warehouses for respective business.

I'm working on building a solution which would consolidate my sales force data and help me report out at an overall business level. This solution needs to capture sales metrics and provide an executive dashboard to the country CEO. It should capture overall leads, sales pipelines, opportunities, sales orders, revenues and backlogs (as summation of individual businesses).

Can you guide me to:
1. BI solution if its readily available in the market place, which i can customize if for my requirements?
2. Any case studies of organizations/companies where such a sales force consolidation has been accomplished?

Thanks

Cognos 10 seems like it might work for you. It can create reports that combines information in different platforms.

The basic issue is that you won't have common dimensions across the org and that's going to make life harder. But short of rebuilding databases and forcing everyone to adopt a common set of dimensions, a reporting solution might be the right way to go.

Try to integrate disparate sources on the fly, particularly at the time of reporting, is very complex and even more difficult to accompish. It is far simpler to build an integrated data warehouse.

The thing is, if you are going to go through all the trouble of figuring out how data in different systems relate, and somehow build an interface so users can do reports, you have pretty much done all the heavy work. You might as well put everything into a single integrated database so reports can run in seconds rather than hours and the user interface is much simpler.

Integration need not be an upfront effort. There are design techniques that allow for data to be combined immediately and be fully integrated over time without disruption to the underlying data or schema.

Given the scope of the undertaking described, be prepared to take some time before reaching a final end state. Establish a program and plan for a multi-year effort with incremental (short term) deliveries.