Business Problem

The customer for this chapter is the same manufacturing company that we discussed in Chapter 3, "Building a Data Warehouse." We will be looking at the broader integration issues underlying the data warehouse solution, taking into account the sources of information and other business processes.

Problem Statement

The manufacturer has grown partly by acquisition, and the need to integrate multiple disparate systems is proving costly and difficult to achieve. Due to the high cost and risk of moving each of the businesses to a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, two systems with different reporting capabilities are currently used. Also, additional information such as budgets and forecasts is generated outside the ERP systems.

This has led to the following problems for the business:

• Managers at every level aren't getting the information they need to run the enterprise effectively. Producing information that describes the business as a whole is difficult to achieve and requires extensive manual processes, which increases costs to bring the two sets of accounts together. To further reduce the effort required, many levels of detail were omitted, leaving the corporation with only a high-level view of operations.

• Information is stale by the time it reaches the readers. Manually consolidating information takes time, leading to the process being initiated only once per quarter.