Storage Management White Papers
Dell Affinity Project
Overview In many businesses, customer information collects in a variety of front-end systems but is never consolidated and rationalized on the back-end to provide maximum business value to the organization. This is especially prevalent in enterprises such as Dell, Inc., which possess a large customer base that is a mix of direct consumer and business customers. Dell saw an opportunity to take advantage of customer information gathered through the Dell direct model. The company sought to improve customer relationship management (CRM) by implementing a robust and consistent data model for defining and identifying its customers throughout the enterprise. The objective for Dell was to create a unique definition of each customer to be used throughout the enterprise for customer relationship management (CRM) and other frontend Systems. Dell deployed Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers running the Linux operating system to create a customer data platform. Dell also uses the Oracle WB Pure Name and Address software suite and internal functions to cleanse and standardize customer names and addresses; develop a custom set of robust algorithms for matching customer data; implement a 2 TB storage area network (SAN) using a DellEMC FC4700 storage array for production and an additional SAN for performance testing. As a result, Dell has enriched quality of customer relationship management (CRM) by creating a Dell customer system of record (code-named "Affinity"); made customer data highly available throughout the enterprise; lowered the cost of fulfillment and improved accuracy of customer mailings by reconciling customer records; enhanced marketing analysis of customer shopping habits; began managing customers holistically to improve customer service and provide targeted marketing offers.
| Publisher | Dell | File Format | PDF, requires Acrobat Rdr 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date Published | July 2004 | Downloads | 5 |
| Format | White Papers | ||
| Topics | |||
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