Northwind

Northwind is a small company that offers many products to its customers. The company starts growing, and there is no way to maintain customer orders and inventory details manually. The company doesn't have an IT department, and they are using Microsoft Excel to perform their data analysis. The data is stored on many isolated Microsoft Access databases. Currently, reporting is done through Microsoft Excel and some basic Microsoft Access reports. The top management of Northwind is facing difficulties finding the required information at the right time. The available information is also not 100 percent accurate, as it is stored and processed manually. As you can see, they need to build a complete system to store all this information and to act as a source for a complete BI solution.

Management was worried about the cost of implementing such a system, and they are also not sure whether Northwind is ready to take this step yet. Market competition was another key factor to consider at this point of time as well, because wrong decisions might lead to big losses. Finally, Northwind needs to make a good profit this year to maintain their share price on the market and to keep their shareholders satisfied.

Northwind's top management formed a special team from many departments across the Northwind organization to come up with a recommendation on this subject. They needed to come up with a recommendation on how to establish a BI reporting system to act as a foundation for a complete BI solution.

The formed committee comes up with the following recommendations:

• Northwind can implement a DWH system to store all the analytics data needed for reporting and analysis purposes. They can also start implementing robust and reliable source systems instead of using isolated Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access files to store their information.
• Northwind can start an assessment for the available BI reporting tools and select one to start and implement.
• Northwind can establish a new department to own the DWH system as well as the new BI reporting system.

Tip

The best practice is to load your DWH with either summarized or detailed information, which is required for analysis and reporting purposes, instead of operational, atomic, transactional, and system logs data. This will help us to achieve the main target of DWH system, which is availing analytical data for the right users at the right time in the right format.

The operational data store (ODS) is the right place to store your operational detailed data. You can refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_data_store for more information on the ODS.

The formed committee recommends SAP BusinessObjects based on the following assessment:

• SAP BO is one of the leading BI tools in the market.
• The SAP BO interface is user friendly, flexible, and can be used by end business users to build their own reports and do on-the-fly analysis without referring back to the technical IT team.
• SAP BO's web intelligence (Webi) report interface is similar to Microsoft Excel. This will ensure a fast-learning curve for all BI users.
• SAP BO's semantic layer (Universe) is powerful and can handle complex business logic.
• A SAP BO Universe can establish a connection to various databases as well as external source files such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access database. This means that we can start building our reporting solution now, without the need to wait for a complete DWH solution.
• SAP BO Universes are able to have multiple data connections to different database management systems (DBMS) as a multisource Universe.
• A SAP BO Universe supports OLAP cubes as well as relational databases.
• A SAP BO Universe supports multiuser development environments.
• A SAP BO Universe's security model can be customized and configured to fulfill any security requirements or needs.

As discussed earlier, Northwind lacks the information that can help their top management make strategic decisions. This will lead them to act based on their gut feeling and experience, instead of facts and numbers. They don't have any idea about what they should plan for in order to achieve their goals and objectives. The solution recommended by the committee will help by giving a data repository that holds all the required information as well as a BI reporting system to build the required reports. These reports will help top management do the required analysis on the historical information that they have, and based on this, they will be able to act on the current situation and take the proper actions that will lead to good results.

Tip

A well-designed Universe will help end business users be independent and facilitate the creation of analytics reports as well as on-the-fly analysis. An IT-oriented Universe will lead business users to be IT dependent, and they will fail to access information. Thus, the entire BI solution might fail.