Manukau City Council Lays NCR Teradata Foundation

Manukau City Council Lays NCR Teradata Foundation

*** Resource and building consents will be first to benefit from data warehouse ***

The local government responsible for one of New Zealand's largest and fastest growing urban centres - Manukau City - has selected the Teradata division of NCR to provide a data warehouse that will consolidate more than 100 individual information systems and serve as a technology platform for future e-business initiatives.

Denis Price, Manukau City Council's (MCC) information and technology manager, says the decision to adopt a Teradata® data warehouse was driven by the need to construct a single, consistent view of the information held within the various council business units, so that it could operate more efficiently and deliver improved services to customers.

"We were faced with dozens of disparate and duplicate database systems, making it very difficult to source and combine the different bits of information we would need to service a customer request," says Mr Price.

"We also recognised that we could not move forward with other e-business initiatives, such as financial applications and customer relationship management solutions, until we had consolidated, cleansed and restructured our current IT systems."

Following an extensive evaluation of several possible technology providers, MCC chose Teradata to build and implement a data warehouse that would not only combine existing council data sources, but would also generate powerful, real-time analytical reports to help managers improve decision-making and expedite customer response times.

"We were looking for a technology partner, not just a technology provider," says Mr Price. "Not only does Teradata demonstrate the necessary expertise and experience, but equally as important is their continued display of commitment and enthusiasm to work with us and our organisational culture. Finding the right people was a significant criteria because we wanted to establish a long-term partnership."

The first phase of the data warehouse project, which was awarded in February, involved creating a blueprint that mapped MCC's business operations, data sources and technical architecture, a process that involved all of the council's senior staff members.

Now that the blueprint has been developed, the next phase involves bringing all of the business critical information from the various council departments into the data warehouse, eliminating duplicated and irrelevant information. This was recently achieved in the council's building and resource consents unit, a process that took less than two months to complete.

"We've helped build the foundation and put up the walls," says Julian Beavis, Teradata's vice president for Australia and New Zealand. "Now it's time to install all the doors and windows. Resource consents will be the first window to what will be a robust, scalable and secure building."

For example, building and resource consents staff will find it much easier to access and retrieve the information they need to manage the consents application process.

"Staff will be able to access everything from one single source," says Mr Price, "and this will inevitably translate into quicker turnaround times for customers."

The data warehouse will also power applications that give the council an improved view of all consent-related operations and make it easier for staff to complete mandatory reports, such as the annual consents audit that every council must provide to central government every year. The data warehouse will now generate this report in a matter of seconds, saving the council the several weeks of staff time and resources that was once required to compile and input all the necessary fields of information.

A pioneer in data warehousing, NCR Teradata is the first to integrate data mining capability, analytical modelling and scoring into a single, powerful database engine. This integration helps businesses drive growth by more quickly and efficiently analysing customer behaviour information, then delivering this business intelligence to frontline employees to better serve customers.

Other Teradata customers in New Zealand include The Warehouse and Guardian Trust.

ENDS

*** About Teradata Division Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, offers powerful analytical solutions that help businesses drive growth. Teradata solutions include the Teradata database, and analytical applications for customer relationship management, operations and financial management, business performance management and e-business. To learn more about Teradata Division and its solutions, go to http://www.Teradata.com.

*** About NCR Corporation NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a leader in providing Relationship Technology solutions to customers worldwide. NCR's Relationship Technology solutions include the Teradata database and analytical applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and demand chain management, store automation systems and automated teller machines (ATMs). The company's business solutions are built on the foundation of its long-established industry knowledge and consulting expertise, value-adding software, global customer support services, a complete line of consumable and media products, and leading edge hardware technology. NCR employs 33,300 in more than 100 countries, and is a component stock of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. More information about NCR and its solutions may be found at www.ncr.com.

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