Use-cases for data warehouse (automation) functionality

During several years of providing data warehouse solutions with automation software, we have come across a range of use-cases for making data available within organizations of all sizes and industries.

The usual, initial and generic use-case is being able to combine data from different source applications where logic or integration rules needs to be applied such as:

• Production, sales and costs
• Absence and production
• Sales and inventory
• External market trends and sales
• Budgets on various detail levels with actuals from various applications
• Resource planning, orders and utilization
• And much, much more

Data may exist in various granularities and more often than not, it requires processes with logic in order to create a combined data model.

Other normal use cases that we see at our customers are:

• Need for table historization. This can be tracking of snapshot data, historizing transactional changes, historizing dimensional attributes (SCD2)
• Flexibility, usability and performance of application reports. Built-in reports in source applications are often very fixed/Standardized and struggles with performance on large data sets or more complicated queries.
• Need for manual input. The need to supporting tables either for data mapping purposes or for adding data which does not exist in source systems.

An automation tool will also accelerate the process of implementing such type of requirements, and often these features are out-of-the box features.

Customer use cases with Xpert BI
We also encounter more specific data requirements, where a data warehouse automation tool provides functionality to support users or applications with easy and qualified access to data. Below are some examples of how we have used the data warehouse automation tool Xpert BI to meet customer needs.

The use cases are structured using the format: Situation →Challenge →Solution → Benefits, with an Xpert BI data platform architecture below, highlighting in pink squares the features that are being used.
 

CASE 1: Providing data to a Chatbot. 

CASE 2: Automating data ingestion from external APIs into existing data platform. 

CASE 3: Providing Data-as-a-Service to an external application trough API.  

CASE 4: SAP as a data source to the SQL Server DWH (cheaper than HANA/BW). 

We see that many organizations want to automate more of their data delivery to reports and insights, but do not know how to get started. To learn more about how you can use data more extensively or how to get started with automating your data platform, please contact us in BI Builders.