Jenny Craig, the weight-management service company, said yesterday that it is using software from Ascential Software Corp. to gain a fuller view of clients and bring its outsourced direct marketing programs in-house.
These moves may save the company an estimated $1 million this year in outsourcing and IT development costs alone.
Jenny Craig selected the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite to build a new data warehouse that collects client and transaction information from 650 Jenny Craig centers worldwide. The warehouse, built in part to reconcile raw data that have been pouring in since 1995, went live in February. It is part of an extensive improvement program that includes employee training and renovation of its centers.
The data warehouse is designed to improve the understanding of clients' activities and needs. The company will be able to orient its customer relationships more around clients' weight-loss success than their product purchases. Marketing staff can better study client purchase patterns, trends and product line performance. Company real estate experts can better determine the best places to build new centers.
The warehouse also will support financial management, financial reporting and purchasing.
Jenny Craig uses Ascential DataStage software nightly to receive new transactional data from its centers and load it into the new data warehouse. Ascential Integrity data quality and cleansing software identifies, corrects and reconciles inaccurate or redundant data.
