Business Intelligence Solutions

 

Does your company hold data in a wide vaiety of data sources, ranging from Spreadsheets to local Databases, legacy databases an your live transactional systems ?

 

Is getting hold of the right information at any momemnt in time a problem for you ?

 

Are your reports slow to run and not responsive ?

 

Many companies experience these problems stemming from an explosion in electronic data together with rising costs of managing and making sense of that data.

 

Your business, like many before it, will benefit from a business intelligence (BI) Solution built on a carefully designed data warehouse or data mart.

 

By standardising the data warehouse data and making use of data aggegations, you will benefit from being able to make timely business decisions based on up to data and accurate data.

 

PBC Systems has the necesary expertise to provide any business with business intelligence solutions that provide the information that a company needs - quickly.

Company data is often held in the form of flat files, spreadsheets and databases. By consolidating the data into a consistent form, and providing understanding of the data through reports based on OLAP cubes or relational databases, our solutions will let your business be able to measure performance far more accurately and flexibly.

 

Data warehouse and Business Intelligence Solutions Overview 

 

To build a data warehouse involves a number of steps, and significant effort, from the identification and bringing together of data throughout a company to the storage in a consistent format in the data warehouse.

 

The data warehouse design process forms the basis of the Business Intelligence (BI) solution. Company data may be held in a wide variety of inconsistent formats, We will design the data warehouse relational tables, and commonly  expos the data as multi dimensional OLAP cubes that can be reported on using fixed reports or a number of client tools.

Designing a company wide datawarehousing solutions or department specific Datamarts involve essentionally the same processes. Typically the steps we take to build the data warehouse are :

 

1. Identification of the business issues; this process flushes out the metrics (measures) required by the business, and how those metrics need to be analyzed (dimensions). From this stage a relational data warehouse design can be produced.

 

2. Identification of the data sources within the organization.The source for the data items within the organisation is typically spread accross flat files, spreadsheets and relational databases. This stage identifies the data, and how it will be collected.

 

3. The ETL Process itself extracts, transforms and loads the source data in a consistent format into the data warehouse. Whether we use DTS on SQL Server 2000 databases or SSIS on SQL Server 2005 and higher databases, the aim is the same - to standardise the data into the format required by the data warehouse database. We may make use of a staging database prior to loading in the data warehouse.

 

4. Building one or more OLAP cubes to provide fast data access. Cubes have important advantages over reporting directly off relational data warehouses, not least being the storing of pre-calculated aggregated values, and multidimensional structure, making it easy for client tools to drill up and down hierarchys, and slice and dice the data as required.

 

5. Building a SQL Reporting solution and custom reports for client access.

 

We provide bespoke business intelligence solutions based around the Microsoft tools of SSAS, SSRS and SQL SSIS, having worked for a number of years on projects requiring our in depth skills in sql, data modelling, Integration Services, Analysis Services, MDX  and Reporting Services. The end result is a consistent business intelligence solution where client inconsistent and disparate data is turned into consistent meaningful information, delivered in a timely manner to the end users.