Data warehouses provide valuable insight into the historical performance of the company and its core operations. Business users and data analysts can get vital information on business trends, consumer behavior including quarterly and annual sales performance. By extracting huge volumes of data from external and operational databases of the company, data warehouse helps in converting them into meaningful data to enable companies to take more data-driven business decisions.
Here we’ve shared some vital information on the need for data warehousing, its key benefits and how it may be implemented effectively within an organization
Why does your company need Data warehousing?
Data warehousing helps in extracting data from operational systems that support the business which is then copied into a data warehouse for reporting and analysis through dashboards, reporting, analytics tools and business intelligence. There may be a few situations which indicate that your organization would find it beneficial using a data warehouse:
- The essential business data may not be readily available which makes reporting on business activities a cumbersome task.
- There may be uncertainties regarding the accuracy of data, due to which the authenticity of the reports cannot be verified.
- Different departments may copy data separately for the purpose of spreadsheet analysis that may be inconsistent with each other.
- The operational systems might slow down due to the running of ad-hoc queries against the production databases.
Data warehousing helps in meeting the above challenges effectively as it can provide accurate answers about your business such as what is happening and why. It helps in improving the availability of data as it collects data across different sources and locations and puts it in a central repository. The operational workflow turns far more efficient as soon as the data is in the warehouse. The data is analyzed, cleansed and transformed in this process, which indicates that the quality of information in the reports generated through the data warehouse can be enhanced further.
What are the benefits of deploying data warehousing solutions?
Data warehousing provides additional support for data as data warehouses are designed to monitor, manage, and analyze information to deliver a more actionable resource. About 37% of the businesses have indicated that data analytics processes help in enhancing business growth. Data related issues can cost over $5 million annually for most of the companies. Data warehousing also helps in providing the context and defining relationships between specific data points.
Here are some of the key benefits of using data warehousing solutions for your company:
Improved business intelligence
Data warehousing provides better access to information as businesses can make decisions based on data-driven facts, which is supported by information gathered by the company over a period of time. It becomes easy to retrieve the information based on the needs of the company and the improved business intelligence can be, thus, applied to core business processes including market segmentation, financial management, inventory management etc.
Quick and timely access to data
Data integration is a critical aspect of data warehousing – it helps to combine data from different sources and convert them into a useful format. Users can access data from multiple sources and quickly retrieval the required data. By employing analysis tools and data query within the data warehouse, it allows companies to spend less time on the collection of data and devote more time towards conducting data analysis.
Ensures quality and consistency in data
The process of data warehousing comprises of data conversion through various sources and converting them into a common format. This ensures that data from different departments along with the processes are consistent and standardized. Besides, other specific business units such as sales, operations, and marketing make use of the same data repository for generating reports and queries. This allows departments to function efficiently by referring to a single source of data and get results in accordance with the needs of an organization.
How can data warehousing be deployed within your organization?
Following are the critical phases of data warehousing deployment –
Requirement analysis and definition
This phase mainly focuses on the business centric planning as the output generated from the data warehouse needs to align with the organizational goals. It may be necessary to ask some of the key questions – what, where, how, why, who when in relation to the business and record these answers so that may be integrated with the solutions that may result eventually.
Design
In this phase, the focus is on building the schematic and semantic models that define the data warehouse. These need to focus on business intelligence and analytical needs of business users and the management of information systems. The internal and external data sources need to be identified including the transactional databases along with the flat file structures. It’s necessary to specify the data which will be imported into the data warehouse and the data which will be used as an external data source.
Development of Data Track
This phase involves mapping of data models to their similar physical design counterparts, database sizing, partitioning of tables, deciding on naming conventions for database warehouse objects for both business and technology users. The second part of this step involves creating schemes for data ETL through various external sources into the data warehouse.
Deployment
Data warehouses need to be deployed in incremental phases to different user groups within the organization. The speed at which this takes place and the way in which the data warehouse is made available to individual groups comprises a part of the rollout plan within the deployment phase.
Monitor performance
It’s necessary to ensure daily and weekly maintenance is conducted not only across the software and hardware levels, but continuous tracking of its overall growth and performance is required.
Protection of the system
Data warehouse comprises of the most valuable asset of the enterprise which is the data itself so all the steps need to be taken to ensure its protection. External or physical threats such as earthquakes, floods or internal threats due to accidents may be taken care by taking the right measures. On the other hand, logical threats pose a greater risk especially related to the failure of the operating system, crashing of the DBMS etc.
Decommission
When the data warehouse or any of its components no longer meet the requirements, it may be best to decommission it and rebuild a new one to meet the new requirements of the organization.
Conclusion
Data warehousing is critical for every organization in today’s competitive environment as it can assist companies in delivering viable business solutions and utilize the information to assess market trends for their successful business growth.