Main Applications of Enterprise Data Warehousing in Business Applications

Enterprise data warehousing is used in a wide variety of business applications that deal with processes and info used in decision support, logistics and inventory management, forecasts in the field of financial data analysis, and trend analysis across virtually all and every business sector. Data warehouses are used to generate reports and analyze certain data, and although this is a very broad definition of data warehousing in the context of business software applications the nature of those databases can easily be described in a broader context since business data is only bits of information stored in digital format.

Business data, actually any data, is stored in those databases with the aim to catalogue information that may come from different sources and to transform it into data that can be processed for later use by managers at any level. Decision making is a process where data warehousing may be of great importance when at stake is to take a decision that could affect the overall business strategy of an organization, for example. Market research is another field where enterprise data warehousing is widely used. Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) are good example of business software that rely heavily on principles and methods used to store and analyze through the means of data warehouses. Those systems have to deal with large volumes of information that have to be retrieved from a database, processes in a specific manner, and then loaded into an analytical software module.

Actually, enterprise data warehouses have to deal also with meta-data, or data on other data, which is quite a challenging task to perform in the framework of large and complex business systems which may contain tones of information on different topics or myriads of items. A large multinational organization usually have data repository containing millions of records which have to be catalogued thus creating quite a complex meta-data object.

Business intelligence tools are considered crucial instrument for designing successful organizational strategies and rarely a high-class business intelligence application will lack functionality to connect to a data warehouse and get data from such a system. Consequently, software developers and software vendors have to design and implement complex software architecture to cope with the challenges offered by enterprise data warehousing. One of the main challenges is related to data coming from a variety of sources, often times in different formats, while the outcome should be data that can be used for analytical and reporting purposes.

As far as business intelligence is concerned, data warehouses will always play an important role in the overall process of creating a reliable business software application. Enterprise data warehousing is not simply a market niche where only large corporations can be considered as prospect customers but a must have tool that should be incorporated into applications used by small and medium sized businesses that do not want to see their competitiveness decrease. Naturally, the use of data warehouses is not limited to business intelligence but most market analysts agree that this is the segment where deployment of complex data warehouses will be crucial for eventual business development.

Bearing in mind that decision making has always needed adequate support by business intelligence the vast majority of market analysts are of opinion that future enterprise software applications will not be viable without a sort of enterprise data warehousing functionality. Business software solutions that feature such functionality are not necessarily cheap but investing in a software system that is enabled to take advantage of enterprise data warehousing will pay off in the long term through improved decision making process which in turn will boost overall performance of the organization.