WWF Ready to Rumble with Sales Analysis Data Mart

Software Magazine, April, 2000 by Elizabeth U. Harding

TURNING DATA into meaningful information has become a holy grail for corporations awash with data. World Wrestling Federation Entertainment Inc., Stamford, Conn., wanted to gain better insights into its financial data stored in Solomon IV, a financial and business management system for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. They hired CEP Systems Inc., a Microsoft certified solution provider, to help them build a sales analysis data mart for managing their growing home video business unit.

According to Kevin Albanese, Wrestling Federation director of IT, the data mart was built in about three weeks using AppsMart 1.5 from AppsCo Software Ltd., based in Surrey, England, with U.S. offices in Bellevue, Wash.

"Our business users are very happy about the new freedom we have given them for analyzing sales data," says Albanese. "They are getting views of the sales data that were previously not possible."

Besides standard reports, the data mart is providing users 12 different views of sales order information, as well as a variety of inquiry and forecasting screens. The system is easy to use, says Albanese, and allows users to run special queries and create custom reports using their own tools.

"I would have had to write a myriad of programs in order to create reports that give them all the different views which they now have at a whim," says Albanese. "Now when they want data, it's there, it's quick to access, and they don't need an IT person to write a program."

Albanese says that the company is planning to use AppsMart in other applications as well. "Now that we have seen what we can do, we have a lot of new ideas," he says. "It's a perfect tool for cash analysis or anything that you need to track by sales, by item, by inventory. The AppsMart cubes just open up the door for slicing and dicing the data."