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Background
Kenwood USA, a leader in technical innovation, markets over 250 products in more than 120 countries worldwide.
Situation
Kenwood's marketing and sales division displays its home and audio products in an annual product feature guide for dealers.
They also produce promotional materials for home and car conventions. Producing this feature guide was very labor-intensive
process and was becoming a bottleneck for the production process of new products. Kenwood needed a way to manage complex product
feature materials that was user-friendly. The company had previously outsourced the project, but was disappointed in the product.
Kenwood's internal IT department did not have the resources required to deliver this solution and needed a partner who would deliver.
The company called on SCG to help.
Solution
Kenwood chose SCG because of its proven track record in delivering applications requiring complex data modeling and design.
The project began with a thorough two- week requirement phase, followed by a design phase. During this time, a prototype was
developed and reviewed to ensure all features had been captured and accounted for.
The technical architecture utilizes the Microsoft platform and development tools to allow global deployment to Japan over a
corporate Intranet. Additionally, data warehousing design principles were used to enable competitive product analyses.
The user interface, developed in Visual Basic, uses the tree view metaphor for easy maintenance of product features, feature
values, specifications, and specification values as the information is received from Japan. The back end data is in Microsoft
SQL Server and most of the business rules are enforced with stored procedures and triggers.
Results
Now Kenwood personnel can produce product guides in a fraction of the time. The first car audio feature guide produced with
the system was delivered well ahead of schedule.
The product feature administration solution has made the production process for Kenwood significantly less labor intensive,
limiting the bulk of the production process to just one full-time employee. It has also made the production of feature guides
more accurate and efficient. Also, Kenwood is using the reporting capabilities to perform competitive product feature analyses.
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| challenges |
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previously failed project |
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time sensitive |
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complex materials |
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| technologies |
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Visual Basic |
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SQL Server |
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| results |
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superior product guides |
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cost effective |
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increased accuracy |
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limited staff required |
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