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Week 13 Discussion
You work in the information technology group of a chain of sporting goods stores. The company operates 40 locations in seven states. The 40 locations are organized into four regions (north, south, east, and west) with 10 stores each. Regional managers are responsible for inventory management, procurement of inventory, sales, and marketing for their particular region. The company has been processing all transactions electronically (with customers and suppliers), and it has captured all the data in a large data warehouse. Unfortunately, the regional managers are complaining that there is so much information in the data warehouse that extracting meaningful data has become difficult. You’ve just been placed on the team that will be designing a new data strategy for the company.
a. Setting up data marts would probably help with the accessibility of information. What type of data marts would you suggest setting up? Make sure you explain who will benefit from the data marts you suggest.
b. For the data marts you identified, list the data that should be stored in each data mart and explain how the regional managers could make use of that information to manage their group of stores.
Data management in a data warehouse requires a strategic system of data organization, management, and processing. For the case of the company data issues provided, I will use my data management skills to enhance the organization for easy accessibility and extraction. The strategy for solving the issues will involve the creation of a data mart. A data mart is a subject-oriented database that is often a partitioned segment of the enterprise data warehouse. The function of the data mart in the company is to provide a focused version and more condensed system of managing data in the warehouse to reflect the process specifications and regulation of the business organization (Golfarelli, & Rizzi, 2009). Each mart will define the specific business function for each of the 40 regions. There are three commendable data marts that will help in enhancing the accessibility of the data are dependent, independent and hybrid. Dependent data mart can easily be built using two different patterns: user access or data junkyard access option. On the other hand, the implementation of an independent data mart is antithetical to the motivation of building a data warehouse the hybrid data mart combines input from sources apart from Data warehouse. This is essential during the integration of ad-hoc.
The kind of data for dependent data mart will include merchandising, advertising, distribution, and sales. For independent, on the other hand, will require the following data; marketing, production services and accounts receivable data. The hybrid data mart will be composed of external and operational data sources. As a regional manager, I will make use of the data mart for data storage management, fast data access, data protection, multiuser support and for security enhancement. The data mart will help the manager optimize and fine-tune employee performance through data management. Regulation of data will be enhanced through the management of fresh data and extraction of old data.
References
Golfarelli, M., & Rizzi, S. (2009). Data warehouse design: Modern principles and methodologies (Vol. 5, pp. 12-19). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Moody, D. L., & Kortink, M. A. (2000, June). From enterprise models to dimensional models: a methodology for data warehouse and data mart design. In DMDW (p. 5).
Reply (Shiva Krishna)
Data marts would be very suitable in simplifying the data extraction process. There are three types of data marts that an organization can choose from. In this case, an independent data mart would be very suitable. Independent data marts can help to improve performance since it does not rely on the bulky data warehouse. It is very realistic for smaller groups within the organization to use these types of data marts (Talend, 2018). Independent data marts are ideal because the regions are autonomous in their operations.
Each independent data mart will have multiple data marts under it in every region. These can be the North, South, East and West data marts. All the data pertaining to a specific region will be stored in the corresponding data mart. These data marts will benefit the region and location managers who are in charge of inventory management, procurement of inventory, sales, and marketing services. They can easily retrieve, analyze and compare data belonging to their locations with that of other locations as well as the whole region.
For every data mart, there should be a number of details. Firstly, each data mart should contain the sales performance of each location and the sum total of all the ten locations. Secondly, marketing data such as strategies applied in each location, research data and the marketing mix used should be stored in each data mart. Thirdly, inventory activities should be stored. This includes inventory purchases, breakages, and sales. In addition, lists of customer and suppliers in every location should be stored in their respective data mart.
Regional managers can compare the performance of each location with that of other locations within a region. They can review and make improvements where performance was poor. For instance, a marketing strategy could be expanded to other regions if it was useful in one region. Areas, where sales were low, could be given more attention.
Reference
Talend. (2018, September 28). What is a Data Mart? (vs a Data Warehouse) – Talend. Retrieved October 26, 2018, from https://www.talend.com/resources/what-is-data-mart/
