Data Warehousing & BI
As infrastructure grows, and database and application portfolios multiply, organizations face a mounting challenge. Data. It is big already and growing exponentially. Every enterprise system – call center, CRM, workflow, ERP, financial package, office suite – generates customer data, financial data, process data, and data about data every hour of every day.
Add to that the volume of semi-structured and unstructured data organizations generate – email, messaging, blogs, documents, images, web content, etc. – and you begin to comprehend. Big data is the next big challenge – and your next big opportunity.
Organizations that can manage and master their huge volumes of data will be able to provide every employee, from the executive suite to the mailroom, and every integrated partner, with real-time insight into operational processes, business relationships, markets, and much, much more. Every stakeholder will gain a real understanding of what all that data and information really communicates about their process, their business unit, or the whole company. Data warehousing and business intelligence solutions from Brandon Systems answer two critical questions – how you manage your data, and how much you gain from the intelligence it provides.
Brandon Systems designs and implements industry-best data solutions appropriate to each customer’s business requirements. Installed locally or delivered as a cloud-based solution hosted in the Brandon Systems data center, we offer data warehouses and BI systems from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAS, and other world-class vendors. We also provide the development, programming, integration, and outsourced services you will need to ride the big data wave.
Data warehouses integrate with all of your applications and databases, aggregate their data, categorize and manage the data according to rules and criteria relevant to your business, analyze the data to find and define interrelationships, and present it back in various structures and/or formats to meet the needs of different users across your organization.
The unique value of the data warehouse originates in its truly enormous capacity. Data warehouses take large volumes of data from many discrete systems across the enterprise or across a network of partner enterprises, then integrate it and transform it into something far more powerful – a single unified repository where all data is accessible for the purpose of making informed business decisions.
Modern data warehouses include these key functions:
- Centralized data control to ensure data quality, enterprise-wide consistency, and rapid response to user requests
- Simplified data manipulation and processing for non-technical employees
- Reporting personalized for groups and individuals throughout the organization
- Decision-making based on real data and real knowledge
- Increased ROI for existing systems by making their data more usable
The distinction between the reporting functions of a data warehouse and the capabilities of a business intelligence solution are a matter of degree – usually a very significant degree. While data warehouses offer basic analysis and reporting, business intelligence solutions deliver unparalleled analysis.
Business Intelligence solutions from leading vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM provide:
- Online analytical processing (OLAP), enabling data analysis that is both very deep (throughout virtually any data set) and flexible (accessing very large numbers of sets)
- Algorithm-based data mining and modeling, allowing developers to create searches and generate results based on highly complex and original queries
- Development and design tools with graphical development interfaces that make it easy to design analyses and reports based on any aggregation, combination, or comparison of data points in the warehouse
- Reporting tools with automated functionality to generate reports relevant to different users or groups – business and financial executives, unit managers, sales teams, office personnel, etc. – on a scheduled or ad hoc basis, or generated by trigger events such as inventory shortfall or web traffic spikes
- Delivery or presentation capabilities ranging from screen-based dashboards to printable documents, and support for any Web or mobile display
Simply put, data warehouse and business intelligence systems, especially when implemented together, deliver the analysis and insight organizations need to rapidly respond to changing situations and make informed, data-driven business decisions. They empower organizations to anticipate customer desires, forecast trends as they emerge, build customer loyalty, cross-sell, up-sell , streamline backend processes such as fulfillment and billing, reduce costs, increase revenues, and outperform the competition.
To discuss how data warehousing and BI can help you reach your goals, contact us today.
