Part of the global Xerox Corporation, Xerox Financial Services (XFS) is a $2 billion business spanning 16 countries. XFS enables businesses to package their entire Xerox solution, including machine leasing, service and third-party software, into one periodic payment. Leasing lets businesses use operating expenses rather than capital expenses, and ensures capital is not spent on depreciating assets.

The challenge

XFS grew rapidly from the turn of the century onwards. A side effect was that business structures grew in parallel, creating disparate data and variations in business processes with only about 80% commonality across regions. Reports were inaccurate and released once every 30 days. XFS decided it was time to build a data warehouse. The company tried using a SQL database and a business intelligence solution, but abandoned them when they proved inefficient.

The solution

An XFS decision support manager saw a demo of WhereScape® RED at a data warehouse design workshop and discovered that it was possible to automate designing, developing, deploying and operating data warehouses. XFS soon made the decision to begin using WhereScape automation.

The results

Although WhereScape was initially deployed as a short-term solution, XFS found it so effective that the company continues to use it for data warehouse development. With the new data warehouse, XFS can now understand and report on all its data. Any discrepancies in the data warehouse can easily be traced back to the source data and snapshots shown to suppliers if required.