Greenstep's analytical services include the construction and maintenance of data warehouses and related consulting. Data warehousing is like as a foundation for a house for analytics services. The use of data warehouses in analytics and reporting solutions is recommended whenever there is data to be organized and managed with ease, and when the amounts of data are significant. Data is often moved to data warehouses using integrations that move information between systems, for example, by utilizing interface technologies.
Data warehouses collect and store the data needed by the entire analytics and reporting system in an automated manner using integrations. It also seeks to modify and model the data to the extent possible if the amount of data is significant. This data warehouse can then be connected to, for example, Power BI, where the final computational logic and visualization are implemented so that it can be presented clearly and informatively. Read more about BI reports here.
Data warehousing services
In order to make corporate reporting agile, light and user-friendly, we recommend setting up a data warehouse in most cases. This helps ensure the usability of your reports without long load times or crashed browser windows. It is essential to understand that when most of the data is already processed in the data warehouse, the reporting tool (Power BI) can only perform the visualization of the data, allowing more advanced analytics and visualization to be implemented efficiently. When the amount of data is small, it is, of course, possible to connect Power BI directly to the systems without any intermediate data storage. This works well as long as the company’s document volumes in the various systems remain moderate.
Setting up a data warehouse
A data warehouse is built to manage and store information retrieved from many different sources. The more systems involved, the more important the data warehouse becomes. If there are several systems to be reported and the amounts of data are significant, it is definitely worth processing and modeling the data in a separate data warehouse and only then loading it into the reporting tool. The data warehouse can also be managed and built by the customer, in which case its maintenance remains the customer's responsibility. Greenstep can also build a data warehouse on a one-time basis and hand over management to the customer after that. However, it is recommended that we continue to manage the data warehouses we have built, so that we can offer even more diverse development proposals for improving the reporting of customer companies and act as agilely as possible regarding changes.
Management of a data warehouse
Management refers to all work related to the maintenance and development of data warehouses. When we manage data warehouses, the user can be confident that the data models are always up-to-date and that the data residing there is validated. We also take care of any changes to the interfaces on behalf of the system vendors and their impact on the data warehouse and related processes. For report users, this work is not reflected in day-to-day operations, but it is a large and important part of reporting development and risk management.
Data warehouse consulting
We can assist our customers with all data warehousing issues and needs. We can support the definition, construction and maintenance of data warehouses. We are therefore able to support the customer from the beginning to the end of the entire data warehouse value chain. If you have any questions about data warehousing and their ancillary systems, please feel free to contact us and we will find out, together with you, how to proceed.
BiBook Data Room – the reporting platform's own data warehouse
We have created our own data warehousing solution called Data Room in connection with the BiBook reporting portal. This allows users to supplement the data sources used in reporting by transferring e.g. Excel files for example, for budgeting or to enter forecasts directly into a BI report using input tables integrated into the Data Room.