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 StatementThe 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:
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