Our engagement philosophy is designed to fit your business environment.

Our engagement philosophy is designed to fit your business environment. We focus on optimizing our resources and your resources to ensure that every team member’s time is highly productive.

Our activities are frequently initiated when a prospective client decides that the Reporting environment they currently support is falling short of business users’ current or future requirements and expectations

We are often introduced to these situations through our strong partnerships with software vendors who have a high degree of confidence in our ability to implement their products successfully.

Prior to beginning development work we can help you with strategic planning and budgeting. Our experience may help you prepare the business case for Business Intelligence (BI) within your organization. We have many years of experience in technical architecture design and database optimization, backed by real life experience with many clients on various platforms including Oracle, SQL Server 2005, Netezza, UDB and Teradata.

Prior to beginning a project we will produce a detailed project plan defining tasks for our consulting team and your internal staff. Dependencies are highlighted and we will always try to work around any issues or delays such as infrastructure configuration problems or conflicting priorities within your organization. In an ideal world this would not be necessary but, in practical terms, it is almost inevitable — particularly with smaller or fast-growing companies.

Implementation

Initial engagement activities will center on gaining an understanding of the dimensionality of your business model.

Our experience with other clients will usually jump-start this process as we quickly identify and map the operational structure of your business to the dimensional model that will represent your business within the data warehouse.

Having completed and agreed with project sponsors that we have captured the business model we will proceed to identify the Key Performance Indicators you track on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

With this knowledge and the assistance of your subject matter experts we will identify the source of all dimensional and transactional data. We will design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process to move and cleanse data from your transactional systems. These transformations may also include a merge with third party data sources such as demographic, statistical or financial data feeds or possibly validation and matching (for example: to the standard Post Office address database).

The key to a successful implementation is a high level of confidence in the accuracy and quality of the data in the data warehouse. We will work with you to design cleansing and QA processes to validate data transformations and reconcile to the source application.

During the load and testing process we will learn more about the data structure and fine-tune the data model for optimal performance.

Having built a solid high performance platform we will configure the reporting tools to take full advantage of the database and work with your Business Users to design dashboards, reports and drill paths.

During implementation we will identify opportunities to schedule reports and optimize report performance. We will provide full documentation and one-on-one assistance to transition the completed product to your support staff.