Solution Overview

We will build a data warehouse that consolidates the data from the ERP systems and other sources to enable new types of analyses and reduce the cost and complexity of delivering information. With our business value-based approach, we will focus on building the necessary functionality to support the highest-priority business objectives while providing a platform for future enhancements.

Business Requirements

The high-level requirements to support the key business objectives are as follows:

• Sales reporting and performance tracking The business needs timely and flexible access to sales information such as units shipped and revenue, including the ability to understand sales performance by territory, by product, and by customer. Ultimately, the goal is to track the actual sales achieved against the targets for each sales territory.

• Profitability A key business driver is that the solution needs to include enough information to enable profitability analysis. This comprises information such as manufacturing and shipping costs and any discounts offered to customers. This will enable the business to understand profitability of product lines as well as types of customers and to optimize the mix of products and customers.

High-Level Architecture

The primary component of our solution is a data warehouse database that receives information from the source systems, as shown in Figure 3-1. We will focus in this phase of the project on building a database to support the requirements, and we will build the data integration process and more complex analytics in the following chapters.

Figure 3-1. High-level architecture

Business Benefits

The solution will deliver the following benefits to the client:

• IT will be better able to support business objectives by delivering new types of information and analyses quickly and cost-effectively.

• The solution will provide better performance for the ERP systems by moving reporting to the data warehouse.