The Data Warehouse Process

There is no magic to building a Data Warehouse but the results of engaging in the process of Data Warehousing sometimes brings seemingly magical results. For us, as a team of consultants, it is quite satisfying to know that our work helps to solve business problems and support new initiatives of profitability and cross-functional cooperation. Sometimes, the win for our clients is quite dramatic. Recently, we delivered a turnkey warehouse to a client that paid for itself many times over - in less than a week. That client mined its golden data assets, with our help, to find that a minor change in a point of sale process resulted in recovering lost revenue of more than a million dollars.

The process of designing, building and implementing a Data Warehouse is one of Change Evolution. The good news is that change breeds opportunity for growth. At Data In Action, our experience implementing change in some of the largest, most successful businesses in America is an asset to your project.

It is important, when deploying a data warehouse, to work with a group that is comfortable sitting on the hot seat of reconciling data definitions (and data uses) across departments and assimilating the many right ways people do the same (or similar) work within your organization. At one client, we were asked to figure out why a multi-million dollar logistics-planning project was not delivering the expected results. We found that at this particular route-driven sales organization, drivers went out of their way to make sure their last stop of the day was the closest to home. Once the logistics-planning system took this new "business rule" into account the project was successful and significant improvements in both communication and productivity were achieved.