Merits of Data Warehousing

In today’s competitive scenario it is natural for both large organizations and multinational companies to have operations spread across several locations within their country and also, in other parts of the globe. Each location of operation would generate huge amounts of data. For instance, insurance firms have data coming in from thousands of external and local branches. Similarly, large retail chains also, have data coming in from numerous stores nationwide or across the globe.

Corporate decision maker would be requiring access to all information and data from each and every source. The success of any business really depends on the efficient utilization of collective data of that organization. But unfortunately, this is not a simple process as it is pretty difficult to understand and utilize this huge mass of data.

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Emergence of Data Warehouses

Data warehousingsystems are known to have come up as one of the main technological approaches toward the development of leaner, newer, more profitable and meaner corporate organizations. Warehousing data is nothing but creation of a permanent storage space or a centralized location for diverse data sources that are required for supporting an organization’s analysis, reporting and all other Business Intelligence functions.

Key Advantages of a Data Warehouse

Delivers Superior Business Intelligence

A data warehouse is very effective in delivering enhanced Business Intelligence. Data warehouses provide data from diverse sources. Thanks to them executives and managers would not require any more, to take any business decision based on restricted or limited data. They no longer need to depend on their gut feeling for making important business decisions.

Additionally, data warehouse and associated BI is directly applicable to business processes such as inventory management, marketing segmentation, sales and financial management.

Saves a Lot of Time

Business users are now able to have easy access to critical data from a multitude of sources, but all data are centralized and available in one place. This facilitates rapid decision-making. Now one can make informed decisions rather quickly on key initiatives. Now valuable time is not wasted in retrieving required data from multifarious sources.

The business executives are now equipped to query the data on their own with very little or practically no IT support. This is both time saving and money saving. Business users no longer need to wait for IT to generate reports.

Improves Data Consistency and Overall Data Quality

When a data warehouse is implemented there is conversion of data or information from diverse source systems into one single common format. As each and every data from different departments has been standardized it is obvious for each department to generate results that are compatible to rest of the departments. Hence, you could rest assured about the accuracy of the data. Accurate data is the backbone of sound and robust business decisions.

Data Warehouse Offers Historical Intelligence

A data warehouse is known to store huge volumes of historical data so that you could now easily analyze diverse trends and time periods for making future predictions. Such data normally cannot really be used for generating reports from any transactional system or for storing in any transactional database.

Generates a High Return on Investment

Organizations that have successfully implemented data warehouses and BI systems complementing them, have actually been successful in generating more revenue and made more savings than those organizations that have not adopted data warehouses and BI systems.

All these plus points are associated with implementation of data warehouses and Business Intelligence systems. The senior management in any organization now has enough reasons to invest in data warehouses.