Design of Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence System : A case study of Retail Industry

Abstract: Business Intelligence (BI) concept has continued to play a vital role in its ability for managers to make quality business decision to resolve the business needs of the organization. BI applications comes handy which allows managers to query, comprehend, and evaluate existing data within their organizations in order to obtain functional knowledge which then assist them in making improved and informed decisions. Data warehouse (DW) is pivotal and central to BI applications in that it integrates several diverse data sources, mainly structured transactional databases. However, current researches in the area of BI suggest that, data is no longer always presented in only to structured databases or format, but they also can be pulled from unstructured sources to make more power the managers’ analysis. Consequently, the ability to manage this existing information is critical for the success of the decision making process. The operational data needs of an organization are addressed by the online transaction processing (OLTP) systems which is important to the day-to-day running of its business. Nevertheless, they are not perfectly suitable for sustaining decision-support queries or business questions that managers normally needs to address. Such questions involve analytics including aggregation, drilldown, and slicing/dicing of data, which are best supported by online analytical processing (OLAP) systems. Data warehouses support OLAP applications by storing and maintaining data in multidimensional format. Data in an OLAP warehouse is extracted and loaded from multiple OLTP data sources (including DB2, Oracle, SQL Server and flat files) using Extract, Transfer, and Load (ETL) tools. This thesis seeks to develop DW and BI system to support the decision makers and business strategist at Crystal Entertainment in making better decision using historical structured or unstructured data.