According to Bill Inmon – the father of the data warehouse, “a data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.”
The concept of DWH was developed as a turning point for data – from powering operations to being an essential link in the decision support systems. A data warehouse is the most valuable foundation for your business, allowing you to be agile in a competitive business landscape and using the data to improve your decision-making.
So here are few reasons to implement a Data Warehouse!
1. You can’t do analytics without a data infrastructure
In this day and age, analytics is something you can’t survive without, and DWH is a great first step to gain great insights from your data! Business intelligence relies on a data warehouse to extract data required for analysis and supporting real-time decision-making.
Also, combining data from different tools can lead to better, more informed decisions for your business.
2. DWH enables historical insight
Storing a large amount of easily accessible historical data means that you can analyze different time periods and historical trends and make future predictions. That is how we made it easy to predict the weather or customer behavior.
Every business is at loss if they don’t store their historical data – from sales, inventory, procurement. For example, you can make better and informed decisions based on the number of sales in July for the last ten years.
3. DWH delivers a competitive advantage
Every business wants to be as effective as possible and improve its decision-making process to generate more leads, create more sales, minimize costs, maximize revenue. So rather than making your decisions based on experience and intuition, you can use your data warehouse to support your decisions with relevant data.
DWH model will deliver a competitive advantage by enabling the consolidation of clean data across multiple systems.
4. Data warehouse is a single source of truth
Single source of truth is the practice used to ensure that everyone in the same organization uses the same data to make business decisions. It often happens that an organization is not sure which data is the right to use, just because they use many different sources. Ensuring that you have a single source of truth will dismiss the problem!
Besides providing you with the right data when you need it, a single source of truth will make sure to eliminate duplicate entries, improve your data quality and increase your data transparency.
5. Data warehouse places emphasis on security
With a data warehouse, you can enable much easier data access to those with a valid need and exclude others who don’t need access. Of course, it implies that each user can only access the data they need for their jobs.
You can also achieve a high level of security by encrypting or classifying data, having role-based control, securing moving data, or partitioning data.
6. Data warehouse drives revenue
Quality data is the ultimate driver of a better decision-making process, and you can’t argue that better decisions imply higher ROI! Thus, while DWH is often observed as a cost, you must look at it as an investment that will pay off in the long run.
Those companies that have implemented data warehouse and business intelligence platforms have generated more revenue and had much more successful businesses than those that haven’t invested in DWH.
7. DWH enables you to save time
Making informed decisions is essential, but the second most important thing is to make a rapid call when it comes to your business resolutions. Having implemented a data warehouse, you have all the information you need at your fingertips, and you can use it in advantage to your competition.
Also, think about the time you will save with your BI and analytics tools once your data is well-organized and set up for efficient analysis.
8. Data warehouse is a foundation for your business
“You cannot build the house without foundations. I have never seen beautiful foundations – they are always a lot of mud, steel, and concrete. But only on good foundations can you build a good and beautiful house.”, said Bill Inmon in one of his lectures.
So why not build a good foundation for your business and put a checkmark on all of the conditions needed for thriving in a competitive industry?
We have covered just a few reasons why a data warehouse is beneficial for your business, but there are many more benefits unique to your industry. Take advantage of these benefits and let our experts help you gain your competitive edge!
