How Businesses Are Reaping the Benefits of Implementing an Enterprise Data Warehouse

Throughout the past few years, Enterprise Data Warehouse systems (EDW) have become one of the most critical elements of modern decision support systems. Their main advantages consists in bringing together data from different sources — not available in the appropriate form in the operational systems, for example, missing historical data — in one central location and arranging them for analysis or drawing together data from diverse sources that may have different formats.

Moreover, it is a landscape that is growing significantly in complexity and acting as the source of structured data , unstructured data and even Big Data . Thanks to the use of an Enterprise Data Warehouse system, the typical risks inherent in heterogeneous data warehousing that most organizations are faced with, i.e. losing track, increasing data redundancy, and long decision-making paths, can be avoided effectively. All relevant partial data from the most critical data sources along your organizations entire value chain are brought together in a way that enables fast and purposeful decision-making at all organizational levels. Numerous types of information, for example, on production, suppliers, products, partners, stock levels, staff, sales and customers, are all combined in the data warehouse system to provide a holistic view.

Attributes of Enterprise Data Warehouse

The following four attributes may be considered to give a granular view of an EDW and how it differs from an ordinary data warehouse.

• The first attribute of an EDW is that it should have a single version of the truth. The entire goal of the warehouse’s design is to come up with a definitive representation of the organization’s business data and the corresponding rules. Given the variety and number of systems and silos of company data within any organization, many business warehouses may not qualify as an EDW.
• Secondly, an Enterprise Data Warehouse should have multiple subject areas. To have a blended version of the truth for a company, an EDW should contain all subject areas concerned to the enterprise such as sales, marketing, finance, human resource and others.
• Thirdly, an Enterprise Data Warehouse should be implemented as a Mission-Critical Environment. The entire underlying infrastructure should handle any unforeseen tedious conditions because failure in the DW means loss of income and revenue and stoppage of the business operation. An EDW must have high availability features such as database structural changes or online parameter, business continuance such as disaster recovery and failover and security features.
• Finally, an EDW should be scalable across numerous dimensions. It should be expected that an organization’s main objective is to grow and that the warehouse should easily handle the growing data complexities of processes that will come together with the progression of the business enterprise.

Let’s look at the Benefits of Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)

In the current scenario, nearly every department within a business can avail benefits from data-driven insights. Here are a few business requirements that EDWs address.

1. Real-time access to actionable data

Enterprise Data Warehouses make data actionable and viewable and in real-time by favoring an ELT approach over the once common ETL paradigm. Data was cleansed and transformed on an external server before loaded into the DW. With an Extract-Load-Transform approach, raw data is extracted from its source & loaded without any change into the DW, making it much faster to analyze and access.

2. Complete understanding of customer

Enterprise Data Warehouses enable a holistic view of a business’s customer, assisting to minimize churn, improve campaign performance, and eventually grow revenue. An EDW also enables predictive analytics, where teams utilize scenario modeling and data-driven forecasting to inform business and marketing decisions.

3. Ensuring and tracking data compliance

Enterprise Data Warehouses facilitate data customers to vet data sources and audit directly and find errors swiftly. A modern EDW can help enable compliance with the EU’s GDPR without implementing an involved process to check multiple data locations.

4. Boosting users with limited technical knowledge

An Enterprise Data Warehouse benefits non-tech employees in job functions beyond finance, marketing, and SCM. For instance, store designers and architects can improve the CX within new stores by delving into data from IoT devices placed in current locations to know which parts of the retail footprint are most or least engaging.

5. Collating data to a single, reliable repository

Modern DW technology allows organizations to store data across cloud providers and different regions. Business users can query an EDW as though it were a unified global data set.

Implementing an Enterprise Data Warehouse Solution

Several software providers offer enterprise data warehouse architecture solutions. Still, for something that fits incredibly with your existing processes and systems, you will be better off building your own. This is not as daunting a prospect as it might appear to be. Kicking off with a reliable CRM platform, users can effectively design a working data warehouse that is entirely compatible with their organizations and on par with anything being offered on the market. Knowing the concept behind the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) goes hand in hand with understanding the requirements of your business. So, before you commit to any particular data warehouse solution — or build your own — do your research.

Wrapping up

Understanding the implementation of an enterprise data warehouse can help you determine what actually fits your data platform needs. Organizations who believe in setting up a warehouse may take years of testing and planning because of the scale and its most typical form. As a business user, you might be tricked by the number of technologies and options utilized, so it’s crucial to consult with professional experts in the field of data warehousing, ETL, and Business Intelligence. They can assist you with the technical aspect, to define the business purpose, and speak with the ones who will use the actual data in their work.

So, get in touch with our experts at Polestar solutions to identify your goals and data requirements. After all, with all the advantages of implementing enterprise data warehouse solutions, it only makes sense to do it right.