TNT revamps data as volumes soar

tnt_post_34_tcm177-401080-300x201UK parcel delivery firm TNT Express has overhauled its data analytics strategy on the back of a tenfold increase in the amount of information it needs to process for sales, marketing and operations.
The company was using three generations of existing Teradata hardware, which had been bolted together and added on over the years, to carry out both traditional business intelligence reporting and realtime analytics.
Faced with the decision to either add on some new hardware to the company’s existing kit or start again, TNT has carried out a complete “refresh” of its Teradata systems.
Mike Robinson, database and business intelligence manager at TNT, said: “We don’t only run business intelligence reports, we also have a number of other realtime systems that we use the system for.
“One example is our customer service system, which allows a customer support person to get a call from a customer and pull up 13 months’ worth of historical transactions from the data warehouse in fractions of a second.”
The company now has just under 20 terabytes of data on the system – in 2008 it had 2 terabytes.
Robinson added: “Over the past five years we have gone from running just standard reports with users running the occasional ad-hoc query, to becoming a lot more knowledgeable about what the data warehouse can bring.
“As a result there have been a lot more applications that have come along, for different parts of the business – some in sales, marketing, operations etc.”
He added: “Three years ago we were running a couple of thousand tactical queries a day, we now run on average 45,000 an hour.”

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