Business Problem


Our customer for this chapter is a mid-size company that manufactures sporting goods and related accessories and, more recently, sports-related clothing. Their customers are large retail companies around the world.

Problem Statement

The information available is restricted by the current enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems' functionality, and it is difficult for end users to access operational information. Building new reports to answer business questions is a slow and costly process, and the promise of "end-user reporting" has never been realized because there are multiple systems, and in each system information is spread across multiple tables and requires expert knowledge to answer simple business questions.

This has led to the following issues:

  • The manufacturer is falling behind competitively because business processes cannot keep up with change. Initiatives such as improvements in on-time deliveries and understanding the real impact of complex customer discounting structures are information intensive and are almost impossible to achieve across the business in a timely and cost-effective way.

  • IT is finding it difficult to give people the information that they need to keep up with a changing business environment, and with the complexity of the different ERP systems, it is taking longer to deliver solutions. It is also expensive to answer simple one-off, what-if type questions.

  • Using the ERP systems for reporting is adversely affecting the transaction systems' performance during peak reporting periods.



Practical Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005
Practical Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005
ISBN: 0321356985
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 132

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