Blanca & Partners N.V.

Blending Technology with Business

Services

The challenge...Many applications lots of databases. This leads to the following problems:

· Which application to use to get a particular piece of information?

· How to generate information that is spread among many data sources?

· How to implement company strategy if data is difficult to access so that making scorecards and digital dashboards is virtually impossible?

· How to give management timely information to guide the company if this information is spread in multiple databases and is not categorized properly?

 

The answer is of course to use a modern version of the data warehouse.

Traditionally the data warehouse contained historical data that was gathered from multiple data sources (A process that ran at night or weekly in the weekends). The data was usually in a raw format and query tools had to be used to categorize, summarize and make proper hierarchies.

With advances in modern tools like Sql Server Analysis Services, the data warehouse  need not contain old information and can be in fact real time or almost real time. Additionally Microsoft Business intelligence tools enables us to organize the data in CUBES so that it will already be categorized, summarized and in the proper hierarchy together with user friendly names for attributes.

The contents of the data warehouse is presented to the data consumers as an OLAP service that can be accessed from Microsoft Excel, SqlServer reporting services or any OLAP enabled reporting tool. At this point the user is of course totally un aware of the original sources of the data.

Original sources of the data can be any OLE DB compliant data source such as flat files, Excel files, Oracle, Sql Server, DB2, AS400 libraries etc..

Reporting

Although users can design their own reports from the data warehouse, that can still be a challenging  process for some users. That’s why Blanca & Partners uses Microsoft Reporting Services to design reports on the data warehouse and make them accessible to the users through a subscription model (push) or availability on the corporate intranet (pull).

Key Performance Indicators

Having an up to date data warehouse enables the organization to do new things. It now possible to set up Key Performance Indicators in the company and use the data in the data warehouse to see if these performance indicators are met on a continual basis. Information that is generated to evaluate the PKI status can be in the form of Scorecards or digital dashboards.

Data warehousing/ Data Analysis and Data Mining