Enterprise Data Warehouse Delivers Single Source of Truth and Streamlines KPIs

Business Situation

This client is a national distributor of quality maintenance products. They have built their reputation by offering customers highly efficient methods to order and monitor purchases.
 

Business Situation

Their processes for serving KPIs to the business were made up of individual reports written against the ERP database, as well as manual on-demand extracts of data from source systems and mashup in Tableau and Excel.

Each report and data extract were created to meet specific needs, resulting in inconsistent implementation of business terminology and KPIs across the business. Similarly named terms and KPIs returned different results, which often led to confusion.

To eliminate this confusion and standardize terminology, they strived to implement an Enterprise Data Warehouse that provides a single source of truth and streamlines the effort to gain insights from their data.
 

Project Objectives

• Improve access to sales information
• Provide business users (analysts, sales managers, sales people) the ability to answer their own data questions using familiar business terms – move from IT-responsible to business-responsible (with as-needed support from IT)
• Enhance business-decision processes with single source-of-truth analysis and metrics that align with goals
• Measure and drive sales against quotas
• Analyze sales by customer demographics
• Simplify data summarization and reduce dependency on IT for maintenance of summary tables
• Allow for the ability to analyze multiple layers of a hierarchy (markets, for example)
• Create capability to track slowly changing dimensions – the “Customers move all the time” scenario
• Incorporate security model so that users have access to the appropriate data
• Support scaling for performance, data volume, and additional data sources
• Improve overall business decision-making capabilities