Business intelligence for online marketplaces
biGENIUS helped implement the company-wide data warehouse within just 9 months, integrating 7 in-house and 2 online sources, improving the level of standardization, expandability and maintainability.
Scout24
Scout24 Switzerland AG is the leading network of online marketplaces for vehicles, real estate and classified ads.
Challenge
New requirements defined by the Scout24 management together with their shareholders — Ringier and KKR to measure the performance of their online marketplaces prompted the development of a company-wide Business Intelligence (BI) solution, because their online systems and data solutions of the online marketplaces were not able to provide the required KPIs in a satisfactory quality and within the desired timeframe.
Scout24 was looking for a suitable partner with expertise in the design, implementation and maintenance of BI solutions to build their new solution.
Solution
The solution includes a historicized data warehouse created according to Scout24's BI and data warehousing best practices:
- Source systems
- Marketplaces
- Sources for analysis
- IIS logs
- Long-term evaluations
- biGENIUS generator
- DWH/BI best practice blueprints
- Simplified architecture of BI system
APPROACH
In October 2014, the basis for building the Scout24 data warehouse was completed and approved within just 3 weeks. The foundational BI concept was tailored to their needs in productive and structured workshops:
Basic BI concept
- BI governance and BI strategy principles
- BI organization / BI competence centre
- Data warehouse / principles of BI architecture
- Standards and guidelines
- Recommendation and choice of technology
The first implementation unit — the integration of ImmoScout24, CRM and NET-Metrix was launched in November 2014. With the biGENIUS data warehouse generator and the pre-establishment of the basic BI concept, the release was made available to the Scout24 team in December 2014, and they were able to start evaluating and presenting their data with the newly built data warehouse by January 2015.
Roadmap
- Establishment of the basic BI concept
- ImmoScout24, CRM and NETMetrix data warehouse
- Production
- AutoScout24 and Google Analytics data warehouse
- Anibis data warehouse, implementation and handover
- Simplified Scout24 data warehouse roadmap: with the new data warehouse, they were able to evaluate the predefined KPIs could be evaluated across all three Scout24 online marketplaces and be processed for management and the investor KKR by the summer of 2015. The high standardization of biGENIUS and the associated simplified maintenance of the data warehouse enables Scout24's Competence Centre BI to look after and further develop this themselves upon completion of the project in August 2015.
The creation of a long-term data store was a central objective in order to clean up and free up the source systems. A historicized data store fulfils these requirements and forms the basis for further stages of expansion of the data warehouse.
In addition, a high level of standardization, expandability and maintainability were required to enable Scout24 to develop the data warehouse independently and at low cost. The use of the biGENIUS data warehouse generator enabled these requirements to be met and also supported the iterative approach in the development of the data warehouse.
SCOPE / CHARACTERISTICS
- Historicized data store and data warehouse core
- 7 in-house and 2 online sources
- > 650 objects in the loading process
- 14 marketplace-specific data marts consisting of 15 fact tables and 34 dimensions
Key benefits
- Close collaboration between the Scout24 and biGENIUS teams contributed to the successful implementation of the project.
- The timely and intensive involvement of all participating partners made it possible to implement the solution on time and within budget.
- Effective support from biGENIUS during the delivery tests enforced the Scout24 team's understanding of their new BI solution.
Client technologies:
- Microsoft Power BI (PowerView, PowerMap and Designer)
- Microsoft Datazen Publisher and Viewer
- biGENIUS generator (implementation) with: data warehouse modelling and generator, documentation backend technology
Backend technologies:
- Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2014
- Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2014
- Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2014
- Microsoft Transact SQL
- Microsoft Datazen Server
- biGENIUS generator (operation) with: lifecycle management, and load control and monitoring
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