SUBWAY(R) Purchasing Cooperative IPC Selects WhereScape Integrated Data Warehouse Development Environment

IPC, headquartered in Miami, Florida, is implementing its new SQL Server data warehouse to gain additional business insights from its terabytes of Subway(R) Card processing data, finance and supply chain data in support of SUBWAY's 25,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada. IPC is responsible for procuring all of the SUBWAY food, packaging, equipment and services for the US and Canada through negotiating price, supply, and distribution terms while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY restaurants and their customers.

"IPC looks at all supply chain opportunities that will result in better operations, savings or quality for SUBWAY franchisees," said Anthony Ronconi, IPC Director of Information Technology. "This is a continuous process with IPC often receiving requests from its members to evaluate taking on new functions. As data volumes continue to grow, our enterprise data warehouse will be key in helping us provide timely data analysis and reports that enable management to make insightful and timely business decisions, benefiting all SUBWAY store owners."

According to Ronconi, IPC's initial data warehouse development efforts, while successful, proved too time consuming making it difficult to meet dynamic business requirements. This resulted in the company performing due diligence looking for a cost-effective solution to aid his team. "WhereScape RED's 'prototype and iterate' data warehouse-building approach is ideal for IPC as our business requirements and needs are constantly evolving and changing. In addition, WhereScape RED has greatly increased the productivity of our developers and our results to date have impressed both our IT group as well as our stakeholders. We have been very pleased with the purchase and progress we are now making," Ronconi said.

IPC's enterprise data warehouse consists of several massive modules including card model, store model, finance and supply chain. For example, just one of the activity fact tables contains more than one billion records, with the enterprise data warehouse containing almost two terabytes of data and growing daily. "The data contained in each of these modules is quite complex, and WhereScape is enabling us to effectively manage that complexity," Ronconi said. Two major modules--card model and store model--have completed testing and have been placed into production. The supply chain module is expected to be in production by year-end, and the finance data will be incorporated into the data warehouse in a multi-phased approach throughout next year.

Ronconi added that IPC has also been highly impressed with the metadata-based documentation-creating capabilities of WhereScape RED. "We have complex reporting relationships in the IPC data warehouse between business units and models, without which proper documentation is very hard to understand for a user, yet alone communicate to other IPC technical resources," he said. "As we make changes to our data warehouse, WhereScape allows us to automatically regenerate the documentation to reflect the changes."

"We are pleased to welcome IPC to the WhereScape customer family and honored to be playing a key role in this high profile data warehouse development effort," said WhereScape Founder and CEO Michael Whitehead. "WhereScape RED ensures that IPC and other organizations can not only quickly and cost-effectively develop data warehousing solutions, but also easily adapt and change the environment as business needs dictate. IPC is in good company, joining more than 100 other SQL Server customers enjoying the productivity, ease of use and cost benefits of the SQL Server and WhereScape combination."

Fully Integrated with Microsoft SQL Server

WhereScape RED provides native support for SQL Server as well as IBM DB2, Oracle and Teradata. The same WhereScape integrated development environment is used to build SQL Server data warehouses as well as Analysis Services cubes. The benefits are simple -- organizations only need to learn one development environment, end to end metadata from the source system through to the cube layer (and where supported the client tool as well), integrated workflow and scheduling for the data warehouse and the cubes, automatically maintained lineage information and documentation from source system extract through to the data warehouse and the cubes.

About IPC

IPC is an independent SUBWAY(R) franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative. IPC negotiates the lowest cost for goods and services, while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY(R) restaurants and their customers. Moreover, IPC is committed to delivering returns to its members year after year. By organizing as a cooperative, the business initiatives are set by the owner members and are benchmarked by the active participation of an elected Board of Directors. For more information, please visit, www.ipcoop.com.

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which enables organizations to ensure that the structure of their data always meets the changing needs of the business. WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing that supports the entire data warehouse management life cycle, integrating source system exploration, schema design, metadata management, warehouse scheduling and enhancement into a single, simple integrated design.

More than 300 customers worldwide are using WhereScape RED on a variety of platforms. Projects performed using WhereScape RED typically come in under budget, ahead of schedule, with improved performance, greater transparency and built on more solid foundations over the systems they replace. WhereScape has head offices in Auckland, New Zealand, Portland Oregon, and Wokingham, UK. For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.

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SOURCE: WhereScape

For WhereScape: 
Humphrey Strategic Communications 
Scott R. Humphrey, 503-644-9709 
humphrey@strategic-pr.com