No doubt as a business that has been going for a few years you’ve a few different methods for retrieving data. Some work well, some not so much. But there’s a tendency to think that the team know the vagaries of each system and can retrieve what they need out of them, so why spend more money when it’s not required? Surely that money is better invested elsewhere?
But accessing data from disparate systems is time consuming, often infuriating and can lead to some expensive, embarrassing mistakes. We’ve all heard of examples of bills being sent to the home of a long-deceased person, aside from this being plain embarrassing for the organisation, it can provoke upset and turmoil on the side of the individual. A PR disaster can easily be averted if records are kept up to date and in a consistent format.
Ok, so what is it?
One thing it isn’t is a normal transactional database. A data warehouse can manage and process huge amounts of data, accessing it from multiple systems and outputting them as you need them. This could be data from the website, social media, a cloud based database or analytics. Eg. Your sales database holds records of your clients and purchases they’ve made, whilst data from the data warehouse could extract that sales information alongside buying patterns, item tracking and promotions.
Once you start to consider the different ways in which it can be utilised, the possibilities are endless. And just think, it’s all up to date, in a consistent format and ready to use. Making the days of having different teams send over their reports (which arrive in different formats) so that you can have the joy of compiling and trying to get something functionable and actionable from them, long gone.
And how will it benefit the company?
One central view of all the company data is the dream; yes, it’s a large project, is it worth it? Yes! There are numerous ways your company will benefit once it’s implemented.
You could say it improves efficiency by increasing productivity combined with better data quality and improved customer service, but that leaves out the point about gaining a competitive advantage….
And not only this but it improves the decision making process and enables confident forecasting.
And we’ve not even mentioned the expected increase in revenues and decrease in costs. Research shows that a typical data warehouse project can provide a return on investment of over 100% over a five year period.
If you want your company to make vast improvements across resource management, market analysis and sales decisions then contact us to find out more.