EMI Music is a record company based in London, with more
than 70 subsidiaries worldwide. Its denomination as a record company became
obsolete since it started to sell digital music.
Many of the EMI Music Latin American subsidiaries are
GeneXus users: Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, for example. Specifically,
EMI Music Mexico has its own development team, that along with Digital Touch -
GeneXus distributor in Mexico - embarked over a year ago on developing a
Business Intelligence (BI) system with GeneXus, and today it uses GeneXus as a
strategic development tool.
"EMI Mexico used Visual Basic with SQL for development
purposes, but we're changing to GeneXus," informed Alejandro Penna, IT Director
at EMI Music Mexico. "A bit over a year ago we started to seriously work with
GeneXus. Although the development team - whose first reaction was fear to lose
their technical know-how- had to be convinced, the truth is that it is very hard
to maintain code developed in Visual Basic with the high turnover of
programmers. On the contrary, with GeneXus it is possible to give continuity to
the different developments," Penna explained. "Maintenance is much easier with
GeneXus, in addition to the fact that I can migrate to the platform I need," he
added.
Today "all new developments at EMI Mexico are made with
GeneXus. There's a Credit and Collection System under production, and we're
about to launch a returns processing system that uses GXFlow," declared the IT
Director at EMI Music Mexico.
In addition, EMI Music Mexico is proposing the creation of
a BI regional model, centralizing the information in New York and extracting
sales data from the region's subsidiaries.
The BI system developed with GeneXus is installed at EMI
Mexico and EMI Brasil. At EMI Mexico the system is actively used by 30 users
from the sales, financing, marketing and operations departments.