The AEON Group is a large and growing organization in Japan. As of early 2007, the company was composed of 155 companies with 10,300 businesses in multiple sectors including general merchandise stores, supermarkets, specialty and convenience stores and financial services.

AEON had been using a legacy information system for 10 years, until increased demand from users for greater speed and accessibility prompted the company to make a change. The new system needed to be highly scalable and easy to use. Additionally, the system needed to provide increased insights for better business decision making in a limited amount of time.

AEON looked to Teradata initially because of its scalability. "We focused the attention on Teradata's worldwide, overwhelming achievement," says Nobuaki Otsuji, general manager of the System Development Department.

Nobuaki Otsuji, general manager of the System Development Department at AEON Group, says Teradata helps make the company's data actionable.

AEON made the switch in 2005. The Teradata data warehouse consolidated all of AEON's data marts and met the company's key requirements. "Teradata is much easier to use in comparison to the other systems," says Otsuji. "We concluded Teradata was reliable in terms of its scalability. Our group currently has a large number of users and requires the capability for all of them to use [the system]. In addition, we may grow much bigger by M and A [mergers and acquisitions], et cetera, which requires the scalability of the system."

These business requirements could not be met under the access limitations experienced with the previous system. For example, on Mondays, users could not access the system and were forced to delay scheduling jobs. "However, the new system allows 30,000 users and 1,000 analysts to see the data at one time," comments Otsuji. Increased accessibility helps solve problems with response between the users and the system.

The data warehouse also meets the need for real-time reporting. "We are now able to provide sales-related data every hour," states Otsuji. "Due to this real-time correspondence, we can share information on the selections of merchandise such as fresh food and the timing for the event or sale."

The ability to make the information actionable greatly enhances the value of the data for AEON. Users can now easily view and act upon the data. "Previously, users were unable to recognize, at a glance, the positive and negative aspects since the information was presented as a list," Otsuji says of the old system. "Due to the reconstruction of the information system by implementing Teradata, we were able to clearly see something negative. It allowed us to find the viewpoint and take immediate action to correct it."

The Teradata data warehouse provides additional business value, including cost reduction, for AEON. "The Merchandise and Logistics system reconstruction affected reducing inventories enough to result in positive impacts on our operation," explains Otsuji. "The new financial system enabled us to reduce the working hours of the stores' employees and labor cost.

"It is hard to exactly tell all the changes Teradata brought us since the system is still new. We are just expecting to achieve cost reduction, et cetera, for the whole group in the process of development, ordering and procurement of the productions. These could be possible by utilizing the data from Teradata effectively as the base system of our group."

With AEON's continued growth, it sees significant opportunities to expand its data warehouse as it strives to improve operations and deliver on its corporate promise that declares "everything we do, we do for our customers." T

Photograph by Makoto Ishida

Teradata Magazine-December 2007