Cabela's, "the world's foremost outfitter," (Sidney, Nebraska) is the world's largest mail order distributor of products for outdoor enthusiasts. Cabela's has 6,000 employees. Every year Cabela's mails more than 60 million catalogs in 60 editions to customers across the entire United States and in 135 other countries. Cabela's also owns eight stores, an e-commerce Web site, and four telemarketing centers in the United States.

In the mid-1990s, executives needed to develop a greater understanding of their customers' behaviors, individual tastes, and purchase preferences. They needed to characterize the different segments of the company's customer base. Essentially they needed a way to cluster or group their customers to understand them, and to target market specific products to the members of each cluster (segment).

At the time, Cabela's relied on outsourced business intelligence and in-house packaged solutions to build separate mailing lists for every single catalog and promotion. This process was costly and slow. In addition, the data's integrity was called into question.

Cabela's adopted IBM's DB2 Universal Data Enterprise Edition and IBM DB2 Warehouse Manager as its platform. Query response times are now 80 percent faster than before; maintenance time and costs have been cut in half. The knowledge gleaned from the data warehouse has enabled the firm's marketing team to improve catalog hit rates and has led to far-reaching improvements to printed catalogs and the e-commerce
Web site, enhancing the customer experience and boosting customer loyalty.

About 30 users (including four full-time statisticians and their staff, and senior managers) access the data warehouse with BRIO Explorer as the front-end querying and reporting tool, and SAS as the statistical analysis tool (both are OLAP tools). The warehouse contains 11 years of information stored in