Visualize new business opportunities. Increase performance and profitability. Respond to competitive pressures. Innovative data warehousing solutions have helped organizations around the world reap significant benefits. Data warehouses have become powerful tools as companies strive to become more responsive to customers and competitive in the marketplace. Structured to empower business users to explore and exploit an enterprise's information assets, a data warehouse takes full advantage of the history created by all applications to ensure the ongoing integrity and quality of critical business data.

The Business Intelligence Services Warehouse Practice is dedicated to helping organizations successfully develop, implement, and maintain these leading-edge solutions. Providing experienced project teams and leveraging partnerships with industry leaders, BIS quickly and effectively helps you take full advantage of data warehouse solutions across nearly every industry including telecommunications, retail, health care, finance, insurance, public sector, homeland security and energy.


The Business Challenge

Why build a data warehouse?

• Decision Making
  Allowing users to extract critical business information from a wide range of operational support systems, a data warehouse gathers information and provides real-time access to key performance indicators. By understanding business operations better the organization is able to make better and faster decisions. Utilizing executive information systems (EIS) and decision support systems (DSS), executives can quickly and easily monitor business operations.
• Data Analysis
  Data warehousing allows users to develop custom report interfaces that meet unique business and information analysis requirements. By graphically measuring productivity, uncovering key trends, and facilitating the development of new strategies, data warehousing gives organizations the opportuity to view data at many different levels, and performn-depth analysis to monitor and track the results of key decisions. This on-line analytical processing (OLAP) capability allows you to modify your business strategy
• Customer Service
  The ability to understand customers intimately — who they are and how and why they buy — are all critical to establishing long-term, value-added relationships. For example, data mining allows an enterprise to identify trends and relationships, creating new product, cross-selling, and up-selling opportunities. The ability to pinpoint potential customer issues and opportunities enables the organization to proactively provide customers with faster, more accurate responses that significantly increase customer satisfaction.
• Operating Costs
  Faster access to the right information increases productivity and raises efficiency while lowering costs. Easily extracting information from large amounts of data, a data warehouse reduces the pull on critical information systems and staff to reduce overall operating expenses. More importantly, data warehousing can provide key performance indicators and operational insights that allow businesses to more effectively utilize and allocate resources, thereby reducing overall operating costs. Creating a successful data warehouse or data mart can be a significant undertaking. Organizations need a proven methodology to design, implement, and manage these applications. Rapidly changing technology, project timeframe pressure, and a limited supply of resources further complicate the delivery of data warehouse solutions.
  

The Business Intelligences Solution

Understanding that development of a fully functioning data warehouse is an iterative process, BIS uses the RoadMap approach, our proven methodology, and three-phase approach (create, manage, and evolve) to deliver our data warehouse solutions. The BIS Data Warehouse Practice provides dedicated, experienced project teams that partner with our clients and with leading product vendors to deliver a complete and sustainable data warehouse solution. Data Warehouse Practice services include:

• User Needs Assessment
  Interviews are designed and conducted to identify the needs of end-users.These needs are summarized, with descriptions of each data set in the organization along with the creation, maintenance, access, and analysis activities for each user group in the organization. A thorough analysis of each group's needs, detailed requirements, and design specifications are documented to ensure that the system supports your business objectives.
• Technical Architecture
  A robust meta data model and effective data aggregation strategy are essential to the success of the data warehouse. This will not only provide dimensional flexibility and superior performance, but will allow for future data growth and dimensional expansion. An efficient, cost-effective solution is designed to meet your data warehousing needs using industry best practices, proven methodologies, and a compilation of recommended database, extraction, and data modeling tools and technologies.
  
• Data Cleansing and Conversion
  Our consultants are experienced in the development of data cleansing and conversion methodologies to assist clients in the transfer of accurate up-to-date data from any source into their data warehouse. We can integrate data into the data warehouse from proprietary and standard formats as well as commercially available data sets. We have experience and relationships with leading extraction and translation tool vendors, which enable the implementation of a rapid and repeatable data cleansing/conversion process.
• Prototype Definition and Data Modeling
  Through production of prototypes for data, system architecture, and dimensional analysis, BIS provides a working model of your actual data that can then be manipulated, reported, and tested in your environment.
• Report Design and Generation
  A flexible report generation interface provides business analysts and executives with the ability to perform analysis of custom reports from their desktops via Web browsers, wireless broadcast, existing applications, or custom reporting software.
• Data Warehousing Implementation
  BIS consultants are experienced in the implementation of data warehouse architecture and related databases, which are the foundation of any data warehousing effort. The integrity rules governing the consistency between information in the data warehouse and the operational applications are identified and initiated.
• Database Administration
  BIS database maintenance and administration promotes data integrity and ensures the long-term evolution and expansion of the data warehouse to support your business objectives. Project
• Management
  Supplying project leaders, analysts, practitioners, and architects as well as education and training services, BIS not only provides a solution that helps you develop and implement your data warehouse, but that also supports its operation and evolution.
  

Complementary Services

As part of the development of a successful data ware house, BIS offers valuable end-to-end solutions through a variety of complementary services providing supplemental services that ensure your success.

• Strategy and Management Consulting
• Creative Design
• e-Application Development
• Business-to-Business Solutions
• Enterprise Application Integration
• Business Intelligence
• Customer Relationship Management
• Enterprise Solutions