Client: JCDecaux, a world leader in outdoor advertising, based in France. Challenge: To define and integrate sales information from subdivisions in 45 countries, each with unique IT and data collection systems, and create a unified view of the company’s global sales operations. Solution: CSC built a Web portal database complete with tools to generate standard and tailor-made reports, enabling better analysis and decision making. Results: JCDecaux’s new ability to gather, query and analyze sales data quickly has allowed it to respond to the global market, streamline its supply chain, and identify and replace low-revenue locations with more efficient poster networks. More Information Read about CSC's Customer Relationship Management offerings. Learn how CSC can improve your supply chain. Contact Us and let our experience help you produce results.

Outdoor advertising leader JCDecaux had a major drag on its growth: it didn't know the profitability of its billboards. By working with CSC, however, the French company created a global view of its billboard sales.

“CSC’s intervention allowed us to study the existing situation and to define the right [sales] indicators,” says Patrick Cardinaël, director of IT strategy and industrialization at JCDecaux. "CSC helped us understand and measure our core processes."

Such introspection was difficult. As it rose to become the world's third largest supplier of poster board and the top supplier to the poster advertising industry, JCDecaux acquired a series of competitors, culminating with the 1999 purchase of Avenir. Along the way, its sales operations, which spanned Europe, became increasingly complicated.

The need for a consistent, overall view
JCDecaux subsidiaries had their own IT platforms. Operating in different countries, they also developed unique sales and reporting habits. To maximize profitability, however, JCDecaux needed to know how much each billboard cost to maintain and how much revenue it brought in, by region, by product and by client.

JCDecaux’s analysts could not get such data for all billboards in France, let alone other countries. Because each standalone division was so different, analysts could evaluate sales only by manually compiling data from different sources. The process was slow, resulting in a delayed and incomplete picture of what was happening in the company.

"It was becoming extremely difficult to gain a precise measurement of the profitability of an advertising operation — with information crossovers between different systems and huge data volumes — or to meet the very subtle demands of geo-marketing," says Cardinaël. "We wanted to introduce a system that provided us with consistent indicators across the group.”

This need intensified in 2001 when JCDecaux was listed on the Euronext stock exchange in Paris. The company now had to give better information not only to its own sales teams but also to financial analysts. JCDecaux launched the 4D project (Decision Data Delivery for Decaux) to produce better data on billboard costs and revenues and provide tools to make the best use of this data.

Tailor-made reports in an automated architecture
JCDecaux issued a request for proposal in March 2002 to study the size and feasibility of the 4D project. CSC, which had previously worked on the company’s back-office systems, won the tender. CSC began by interviewing all of the company directors and studying the measures they were using for each activity. "CSC had to go very deeply into each system to understand the real meaning of the numbers," says Jean-Louis Gross, vice president for the Western Region of CSC’s European Group.

The project team created an Internet portal through which JCDecaux’s subsidiaries could report weekly sales data. To store the data, CSC built a global data warehouse that is generic and upgradeable. CSC created standard reports for each activity and defined the data marts that would populate those reports. To complete the project, the team created tools to query the data warehouse directly, instead of through one of the standard reports. This would allow analysts to create new measures on factors such as construction materials and illumination.

Immediate Results
CSC completed 4D on budget and deployed it in France and the United Kingdom by the end of 2003, and it is on schedule to be deployed globally in the United States, Southeast Asia and the rest of Europe by the end of 2006. JCDecaux’s analysts have already begun to use 4D to create their own key profitability indicators and monitor them over time. Users can work region by region or product by product and construct ad hoc as well as standard reports. JCDecaux’s analysts can now query, check, and analyze their data in just a few days, compared to several weeks, which was required in the past. The first clear business results became visible when analysts could identify low-revenue locations and replace them with more efficient poster networks.

The tools help JCDecaux identify current trends and their causes more quickly, making it more agile in its management of billboards. According to CSC's Gross, the user-friendliness of the tools and the efforts to manage the transition to them has helped them find acceptance with product managers, sales and marketing teams, finance staff, and senior management. He says, "The technical solutions have been well-received by people who were not particularly fond of technology."