eCapital Advisors Case Study: DCIP
“The eCapital team was very open about its capabilities and resources. They never tried to offer us a canned solution. Instead, they listened to our needs, took into account some of our blue sky ideas, then looked for sensible ways to implement them. I appreciated their flexibility, and the fact that their team integrated nicely with our own. The project management and forecasting were also spot on. The project completed on time and under budget.”
Tom Schmidt, VP of Technology, DCIP
About Digital Cinema Implementation Partners
Digital Cinema Implementation Partners (DCIP) is the world’s largest digital cinema integrator. Owned equally by exhibition industry leaders AMC Entertainment Inc., Cinemark USA, Inc. and Regal Entertainment Inc., it was created to plan and implement the deployment of digital cinema during the motion picture industry’s transition from film to digital technology. DCIP currently represents approximately 45 percent of the screens in the U.S. and 80 percent in Canada. By the end of its deployment, it will have installed digital cinema systems in more than 18,000 screens across North America.
Challenge
DCIP is a young, fast-moving company used to operating in real-time. Their business objective is to transition all movie theatres from 35mm film to digital projectors, however their own data infrastructure was a technological headache. Less than two years into its operation, the company was functioning without any data warehousing, and trying to satisfy reporting requests directly from transactional systems. Information was going into multiple databases, and being pulled across several data platforms that were designed for transactions not reporting.
Not only was analytical information difficult to get, but DCIP also needed the flexibility and security of being able to customize its reporting by recipient.
Strategy
DCIP wanted a broad-scoped approach that could be implemented in stages, and contacted eCapital Advisors in part because of its extensive data warehousing experience. eCapital Advisors has created a proven practice when implementing data intensive projects called the Concept Design approach. By using the Concept Design approach on the DCIP project, eCapital Advisors was able to validate the project requirements and align the business and technical teams. The key to the Concept Design is to start the design session by asking business questions related to actionable measures, data context and data usage. The result of the Concept Design is a data model and approach that meet the data requirements, a logical data model and defined source data mappings.
As a result of the DCIP Concept Design, a solution was identified to build a data warehouse where the team first created an operational data store then combined the data from four different transaction systems into one operational data store. eCapital Advisors also created a road map to help everyone visualize where they wanted to go, and to identify any roadblocks.
Because DCIP team members were working side-by-side on this project, eCapital Advisors was careful to ensure that the scope of the project was realistic, and that the project had clear built-in stopping points.
Approach
One of eCapital Advisor’s priorities in creating a very thorough initial design was to become familiar with each column data and understand why it is important to DCIP. This detailed preparation ensured that the data warehousing build went smoothly.
Impact
The DCIP and eCapital Advisor teams worked collaboratively during stage one, easily overcoming minor challenges. For example, because DCIP was used to working with a live transactional system, they had grown used to real-time reports. eCapital Advisors worked with DCIP to implement a solution that can scale and support a real-time data warehouse, leveraging Microsoft Change Data Capture as well as other Microsoft detail tools.
While moving the project forward, eCapital Advisors also mentored the DCIP team members, who had used some of the tool set in the past but not to the extent needed.
Now that the data warehousing processes have been developed, tested and implemented, DCIP is envisioning the possibilities! Stage 2 is to begin collecting the data and implementing the different reporting solutions such as dashboards. As they explore the various ways that they can take advantage of their new technology, the company is revisiting and tweaking the proposed architecture for its reporting systems.
But they are perhaps most excited about having all of the key analytics – from trends and operational metrics to receivables and cash flow – available on their iPhones with a minimal delay period.
Now that data warehousing system has been successfully designed and developed, DCIP is envisioning the possibilities!
