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Data Warehousing (and Business
Intelligence)
There is wealth of experience and
expertise within Pinnacle Business Solutions so that data warehouses and
business intelligence systems can be designed and delivered to bring vast
benefits, both financial and operational, to our customers.
Business Intelligence systems may be considered as a refinery for the
large volumes of data gathered by an organisation. Data is fed, often from
several sources, into a data warehouse that will normally be designed to
enable efficient retrieval of information. On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)
tools may then be used to extract information frequently presented with
high level summaries that may be analysed in a multitude of ways and
allowing drill down to study details where required.
Today, Business Intelligence systems provide mission critical tools for
the senior management in any major organisation. The solutions that deal
with vast quantities of data and numerous sources of information may
require specialised tools and highly specialised personnel. We are able to
provide very large scale data warehouse solutions and we have undertaken a
substantial amount of work in this area. This included a sizeable
contribution to a data warehouse for Marks & Spencer which provides CRM
data and, by general standards is a very large data warehouse. These types
and size of data warehouse solutions require highly specialised tools and
skills.
At Pinnacle Business Solutions we have toolsets available that allow us to
deliver very cost effective Business Intelligence solutions that will
operate efficiently even with very large volumes of data. Programming
skills required to load data are similar to those used to develop most of
our MatriX suite of systems and we have detailed and comprehensive
expertise in the areas of legacy systems and data held within them. Our
systems integration and data extract / transfer toolkit and skills is
vital when considering the creation of a data warehouse to support
business intelligence and decision support activities.
Our systems integration and interfacing knowledge and expertise is also
extremely useful and applicable when extracting and mapping data from a
legacy system into an up to date relational database management system. In
addition to ‘mapping’ the data elements from one information source to
another, the load process may also require data cleansing. Requirements
for data cleansing can vary according to the quality of validation
programmes that may be used where the information is originally entered by
a user. It can cover examples such as verification that dates actually
fall within a realistic range, addresses that actually match against the
post code or removal of duplicate data. The removal of duplicate
information, often due to data entry mistakes, is usually quite feasible
where a variety of techniques can be used to locate duplicated records and
then merge the best quality fields into a “de-duplicated” record set.
It is quite likely that every company, no matter how small, can benefit
from Business Information systems. It may be quite surprising how much
information is being gathered yet how little advantage is being taken by
analysis of data either to develop additional new business or to make
operational cost savings.
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