Business Intelligence Success Story
Shaw Communications
Shaw Communications Inc. is a diversified Canadian telecommunications company
whose core business is providing broadband cable television, Internet, digital phone
and satellite direct-to-home (DTH) services to approximately 3.0 million customers.
Over the years, Shaw has greatly expanded its network and leading edge product
and service offerings, becoming the leading residential broadband service provider
in Western Canada. Shaw is traded on both the Toronto and New York stock
exchange.
Challenge
The main challenge for Shaw was a lack of effective reporting on key management
statistics required by their high level executives. Daily, monthly and quarterly
production of these crucial statistics relied on a manual process to transform legacy
reports into measures that conformed to external financial reporting guidelines. As
these reports were constructed manually, they were prone to errors and quite
arduous to create. Daily reports took up to 3 hours to build, while monthly and
quarterly reports were not available until the 3rd business day at each month end
and quarter end. The integrity of the reported key measures was dependent on
manual quality checks and as a result, the created reports were not always
accurate.
Solution
Ideaca Knowledge Services worked with Shaw to implement the first stage of a data
warehouse. Ideaca’s team designed a Data mart to allow for better reporting
measures and also created a more efficient process for generating reports. The
solution provided by Ideaca, allowed reports to be generated end to end without
human intervention, thus eliminating the manual work that was previously done by
Shaw employees to create key management statistics. The data structure was
designed to provide Shaw executives with the ability to examine their numbers more
extensively and also gave Shaw the tools to dive deeper into customer data
analyses. Additionally, a large part of this project was knowledge transfer, which
would enable Shaw to take on future projects.
Benefits
The Key Management Statistics solution Shaw implemented resolved a number of
core business issues and provided significant benefits:
- Accurate and on time daily, monthly and quarterly reporting
- Reduction in time and human effort to generate reports resulting in
increased employee productivity
- Ability to dive deeper into data for more accurate business insight and analysis