The foundation on which all effective business intelligence activities are based is data – reliable, structured, collected over time, which can be analyzed, transformed into information and knowledge, and from which conclusions can be drawn and forecasts built. For all these processes to have a chance of success, it is necessary to use a specific tool – a data warehouse. A data warehouse is something more than a relational database, successfully used for years in many industries – it is a multidimensional structure where partial data from all units, cells, departments and divisions of an organization are collected, stored, structured and analyzed. It is the main repository used by various reporting systems. Its greatest advantage is the aforementioned multidimensionality, which allows to perform complex analyses regardless of data source (financial data, sales, marketing) in a very fast and flexible way.
The key benefits of Data Warehouse implementation in an organization include:
- Improving decision-making by providing faster access to information
- Increased control over data as well as enhanced data protection through the use of different levels of system access
- Significantly reduce the number of Excel sheets circulating around the organization, which – often manually filled out – do not provide the required efficiency in reporting processes
- Automation of a significant part of reporting processes by eliminating manual reconciliations and standardizations
- Setting up a single, consistent source of reliable information eliminates uncertainty about the origin of data and speeds up processes
