AA data migration seals Centrica split

Customer records warehouse set to halve cost of ownership

The AA has completed a six-month project to separate its 24 million customer records from data held by former parent company Centrica, saving millions of pounds in the process.

When the motoring group was sold off from the business services group by two private equity firms in 2004, it was given less than a year to extract its own customer database from the centralised one.

‘The migration from the Centrica system will halve our cost of ownership,’ said Trevor Didcock, AA director of information systems.

Centrica’s database holds terabytes of information on live and inactive customers from all

its subsidiary brands, including Onetel and British Gas.

The AA had to create a data warehouse containing only the customer records from the centralised resource that were relevant to its own business, and consolidate the rest of its business information onto one platform.

‘We considered the “clone and go” option to copy the entire database, but saw the merit in changing it and establishing a platform for future development, as well as reducing the cost of ownership,’ said Nigel Clark, director of business development at the AA.

The old data warehouse environment ran on a mixture of systems, including Oracle, SAS and Business Objects.

The AA wanted to move to a single SAS 9 environment to reduce complexity.

The new system handles about 16Tb of data, about a third of which originated in Centrica’s customer data warehouse.

‘We cut our total cost of ownership in half,’ said Clark.

The platform will also improve campaign management, provide the flexibility to add data and analytics easily, and make the warehouse directly accessible by call centre staff.

‘Clearly, the business benefit of being able to create a single team for all our analytical capability is significant,’ said Diana Kennedy, head of architecture and planning at the AA.