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Consumer interest in higher-tech home music systems is on the rise, as are innovations in wireless technology and higher-resolution digital music files. Among the hot products are wireless speakers that can fill the entire house with sound.

Sound United LLC is a global company focused on developing audio/video products and services to meet the needs of customers in an increasingly digital world. Serving the consumer and custom-installation markets, Sound United LLC iconic brands include Denon®, Marantz®, Boston Acoustics®, and HEOS®, a wireless music system.

Understanding its audience and creating a superior user experience is pivotal to Sound United LLC. Today, it’s easier than ever for Sound United LLC to analyze its audience and get a better idea of who’s interacting with the brand and why. The company is able to use the product activation information—a form of Internet of Things data—as a proxy for product performance by country and location, using the IP address and MAC address of the product itself. The app Sound United LLC supplies with its products also enables the company to collect more information on what customers are experiencing. Insights from this information also helps the company with product development.

“We have other AWS feeds that tell us what people are streaming on their devices, so that becomes another data source,” says Barbara.

Sound United LLC has a lot of potential data points to build audience profiles and understand what motivates its audience. The data is available - it was just a matter of integrating a wide range of data and tapping into the right sources.

Integrating a wide range of data sourcesSound United LLC has a presence in North America, Europe and Asia, and each area has its own unique ERP. Several years ago,

Sound United LLC built a data warehouse for its North America business and began using a data warehouse ETL tool. “The tool was relatively inexpensive, but wasn’t very user-friendly at all,” says Barbara. “After we tried to integrate other ERP systems but kept running into a wall, Barkawi Management Consultants, our data warehousing consulting firm, recommended Talend.”

Today Sound United LLC uses Talend to load that information into the data warehouse to help understand the customer experience with the app and any issues customers may have. Talend integrates a range of data sources, including: • Oracle CRM for call center data, including caller demographics and service issue data

• JD Edwards (Oracle) ERP for sales and product data from North America

• SAP for sales and product data from Europe and Japan

• AWS for Internet of Things, big data, production activations, activation locations, customer email addresses, and customer streaming habits

• appFigures for customer experience information

• Google Analytics for website traffic information

• EDI for weekly point-of-sale information from sales channel partners, including Best Buy, Amazon and Magnolia Home Theater

Data from all these sources is loaded into an IBM DB2 data warehouse. Sound United LLC then uses DB2 Web Query in combination with Microsoft Excel or Tableau data visualization software as a presentation layer. Barbara says the Sound United LLC data warehouse is currently about 500GB and growing as the company pulls in some 500K records a day.

“One of the things we like most about Talend is its flexibility in terms of pulling

Delighting music fans through inspired sound

“With Talend, besides getting product performance insights, we’re able to better target audiences and create a superior customer experience.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Media and Entertainment

INFORMATION• HQ: USA

• 500-1,000 employees

USE CASE• Customer experience

CHALLENGE• A highly-competitive market worth $54 billion by 2022. “Performance is Everything”

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Data Management (Talend Data Integration AWS and Talend Data Quality)

RESULTS

• A 500GB Data warehouse. 500K records a day

• More targeted marketing campaigns

• Enhanced product performance

• Improved demand planning and supply chain

• Better customer experience management

”Derek Barbara, Senior Manager of Business Applications, Sound United LLC.

data in and normalizing it on the fly,” says Barbara. “Because we have so many different data sources, being able to filter items out and add intelligence as table-structured data comes in was definitely one of the selling points for Talend.” “With HEOS sales, we receive notice of product activations and other product usage details via AWS, which we load into our data warehouse via Talend.”

Leveraging Internet of Things information Barbara estimates that the activation reports go to roughly 100 employees every month.

Most of the activation reports go to the company CEO and to leadership teams to help with planning and decision-making.

Marketing receives the information on the use of streaming services and other activation reporting on a monthly basis, and uses it to plan campaigns, including promotions with streaming services and retail partners.

“We know where the product is being activated as well as who is registering the product using their email address,” Barbara says. “Besides getting product performance insights, we’re able to target audiences for marketing because we know how many of our products customers have in the house and what would enhance their audio experience based on their usage of our product.”

The department responsible for inventory also uses the activation reports for supply chain planning. Barbara says Sound United LLC maps the manufacturing serial number to the MAC address in order to pinpoint where an activated product was bought. “When we ship from our warehouses, we scan the serial number, and when a product is activated, we also capture that serial

number,” he says. “The result is that we can do a full lifecycle analysis on a product that, for example, was manufactured in December, sold in January and activated in March.” Barbara says Sound United LLC uses this intelligence to identify how much inventory retail partners are holding and how much they are selling, which improves demand planning for the company.

Why Talend?Barbara says Talend fit the description of what Sound United LLC was looking for, namely, a flexible integration and ETL solution that connects quickly and easily to a wide range of data sources. “So we purchased Talend and were quickly able to pull Oracle data from North America along with data from our SAP system in Europe and from our SAP system in the Asia-Pacific region,” he says.

Sound United LLC successfully used Talend’s ETL functionality within six weeks of deploying the Talend Platform for Data Management, which includes the Data Integration and Data Quality tools. “Fast time-to-results is a key benefit,” says Barbara. “Talend native connectors give you flexibility to connect to a range of data sources right away and begin integrating data without having to build those connections.”

Planning next steps with Talend“The next integration project with Talend will be around customer experience reporting,” says Barbara. “Right now, we’re shopping for text analytics products to integrate with appFigures information to understand what people are saying about our products. We’re going to be pulling in ratings and reviews from Amazon and Best Buy and aggregating them in our data warehouse. We’ll use Talend as our integration tool, then run advanced text analytics on top to get meaningful insight into consumer sentiment. This helps us improve both our products and the customer’s experience with them. That’s the next frontier for us.

Summing up Sound United LLC’s overall experience with Talend, Barbara says, ”Talend’s flexibility and library of connectors and APIs that work with a tremendous number of data sources really make integration projects easy.”

“We’ve had a really great experience. Honestly, if I were to do this again at a different company, Talend would be the tool.”

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HEOS Reporting Technical Approach Sources and Information Flow

North America ERP • Sales Data • Customer Info • Product details

Product Usage Data • Product activations • Product location • E-mails account registration • Music streaming accounts • Music streaming usage statistics

CRM + SRM • Caller demographics • Service call details • Product information

Sound United LLC pulls data on its HEOS product from multiple sources, stores it in an IBM data warehouse, generates reports and analyses to enhance operations and results in marketing, finance and supply chain management.