Any company that has data should have a decent Data Warehouse.

Any company that has data should have a decent Data Warehouse. Data is pure gold.

Mining data can be done in lots of different domains: from a tailored application, from an accounting package, from a human resources salary solution or even from an excel that supports your core business.

What is a Data Warehouse?

A Data Warehouse is a collection of data that is stored in such a way that it can be retrieved very quickly in order to be able to present it on a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop.

Building such a Data Warehouse is the basis for turning it into a cube. A cube is a model in which the data can be stored. The results can be used for both operational excellence and management decisions. The goal is always to be able to make decisions very quickly using the dashboards, overviews, views in Excel, reports, etc.

Typically, these Data Warehouses and cubes are built during an ETL process (Extract, Load and Transform). The data is retrieved and placed in a unique designed environment.

Specific processes and tools are used to retrieve the data, eg Power Automate or Integration Services. This data is refreshed at least once a day. A much shorter frequency is also possible to have up-to-date information available more quickly.
The last step of the ETL process is building the actual cube.

Once such a cube has been built, they can be consulted very quickly.
There are several ways to consult the information. Excel, PowerBI, QlikView and Tableau are well-known reporting tools.

These tools allow you to quickly display the dashboard and deep dive into specific details for trend analysis, order forecasting, or to gather information.

Numerous dimensions are used to visualize data, such as data per customer, supplier, per product, per production line, per representative, per employee.