No matter what kind of business you operate, there is a significant amount of data collected at the end of each business day. This data is a gold mine for your business if you use it properly. That is why you need to invest in integration and data warehousing systems. A data warehouse is a central data depository that integrates data from various sourcessuch as transactions, applications and external systems. The data warehouse is separate from the businesses operation system. It hasexclusive design to offer decisional support, analytical reports, data mining and information predictions. Isolating all this data from the business operations allows for the performance of queries and analytics without affecting the businesses primarytransactions.
The benefits of data warehouses include:
- Enhanced Business Intelligence
A solid data warehouse is the foundation of any business intelligence system. Business intelligence relies greatly in data collected precisely and organized into convenient categories. With a data warehouse, decisions are no longer based on ‘gut feelings’ but on well analyzed and monitored information that contains a realistic interpretation of business operations based on the data collected. The information from the data warehouse can integrate with business processes such as marketing, financial management, sales and inventory management.
- Better System performance
The entire purposes of the data warehouse design is for speedy retrieval and analysis if data. The warehouse can handle large volumes of data for analysis than simply the efficient upkeep of data. It is easier to integrate software for analysis and monitoring data in a data warehouse than any other data storage system. This allows you to distribute the system load across the entire business organization.
- Multiple sources of data
Business Intelligence depends greatly on your ability to collect and integrate data built in different platforms. A data warehouse can integrate existing data from disparate data sources and make them accessible through one convenient channel. This reduces the complexity of data gathering and conversion efforts. You can extract much more varied and rich information from the data warehouse for this.
- Time effective
Time is money and in the business world, this is not just a catchy phrase. You need to be able to make informed decisions rapidly for the betterment of your business. If you do not have access to information then whatever decision you make has no guarantee of having a positive result in your business. Data warehouses make it extremely easy to retrieve organized information fast.Therefore, the next time you need to make a quick decision, you do not have to go in blind. You can also create scheduled data integration to consolidate data from different sources and present the information in a useful format on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.
- Data quality and consistency
A data warehouse system has to collect data from numerous sources and convert it into uniform data formats. The automated process is free of human errors and standardized for consistency in the quality of data produced. Merging the data results in the production of consistent results in the different business departments within an organization since the business covers across all these platforms. There will be no lag in some departments and this uniform performance results in bigger growth of business.
Bio
Vanessa Georgiou is a business analyst who shares valuable business tips and tactics through her blog. You can find out more about data warehousing and other management systems for better business.