Netgear is one of the three largest US manufacturers of the networking products as well as a manufacturer of other computer hardware.   Netgear has a predominant market share in home networking producst and is second in overall networking product market share.

Netgear sells primarily through a sales channel network, which includes traditional retailers (e.g. Wal-Mart, BestBuy), online retailers (e.g. Amazon.com), direct market resellers, value added resellers, and broadband service providers worldwide.

Netgear outsources some of its manufacturing to other electronics companies, including Askey, Asus, FoxConn, believing that by outsourcing its manufacturing it is able to deliver a better cost price to consumers as well as keeping the quality to their expected standards. 

Solution Overview

Netgear has the extremely sophisticated supply chain planning and management processes that allows them to respond quickly and effectively to ever-changing demand and market situations laced with fierce competition, new emerging technologies, and innovative products.

Netgear is using several products within the Oracle stack to manage various aspects of their business.  These technologies include Oracle E-Business, Oracle Demantra (forecasting), and Agile (product life-cycle management).  They also employ Zyme Solutions services to collect point-of-sale (POS) data from the various Netgear sales channels.

There was not a packaged BI solution available on the market that would consolidate data from all the Netgear source systems which would allow for analysis of the entire supply chain picture. Supply chain management can be a very complex process and the lack of pre-built business intelligence products in this area shows that painting concise picture of all moving parts inside the process makes supply chain management a complex guessing game prone to miscalculations and errors if executed incorrectly.

Netgear worked with KPI Partners to create a custom data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) reporting solution that consolidates data from all sources and delivers series of dashboards to show supply chain metrics which are based on daily updated data, historic reporting, and trend analysis. 

Netgear's supply chain analysis solution is based on Oracle technology for data warehousing and analytics.

• Oracle Warehouse Builder
• Oracle Business Intelligence
• Oracle Database 

KPI Partners consultants developed the customer-specific star schemas, extract-transform-load (ETL) mappings, business intelligence metadata, analysis, and reports as part of this solution.