Your company should query all data seamlessly to keep up with the changing industry trends and demanding customer needs. Fortunately, an enterprise data warehouse is an actionable resource and enables easy access to all data in a single location.

Having self-service access and a unified setting can empower you to forecast opportunities, identify problems, and run accurate reports.

What are the elements of an enterprise data warehouse?

Enterprise data warehouse covers both department and enterprise-level concerns. It gathers data from external sources as well as business-critical software, such as:

• IoT device management system
• Talent management system
• Business process management system
• Accounting software
• Intranet
• CRM system
• The company’s website
• Enterprise resource planning system

Types of enterprise data warehouse

On-premise and cloud-based deployment environments are the two main types of EDW for data warehousing solutions.

On-premise solutions are more secure and faster compared to cloud systems. This is because on-premises tools do not stay in far-off servers such as the cloud so that companies can begin their analysis quicker.

On the one hand, cloud-based systems are scalable and have lower business initial costs.

Both tools, cloud-based and on-premises, can help your organization fully control data permissions and profiles.

The advantages of enterprise data warehouse

The following are excellent reasons why your company should invest in an enterprise data warehouse:

Real-time data access. Enterprise data warehouse utilizes the extract-load-transform approach, making your data actionable and viewable in real-time. It means that data is extracted and loaded from the source to the data warehouse relatively unchanged, which allows for faster access and analysis.

Standardization and storage. Enterprise data warehouse collects and stores datasets from different areas of the organization, unlike traditional data warehouse that often comes with disconnected datasets. EDW can accumulate large amounts of data, translating and transforming them for accurate comparison.

Although data sources of a company may be unrelated, standardization and storage can identify key connections among projects, contributing to the business’s overall success.

Greater customer understanding. Using EDW will help your business have a comprehensive view and understanding of your customers. This results in reducing churn rate, boosting campaign performance, and growing revenue. Enterprise data warehouse also helps with predictive analytics, in which you use data-driven forecasting and scenario modeling for marketing decisions.

Suitable for users who lack technical knowledge. Those employees who are non-technical can still benefit from using enterprise data warehouse in various job functions besides the supply chain, finance, and marketing purposes.

For example, store designers and architects can put IoT devices in existing locations and tap data from them to determine which areas of the retail footprint are least and most effective. 

Flexibility. EDWs have malleable structures. So, when you find out that data requires some changes or removal, there is no need for a complete overhaul of the EDW system.

The quality improvements of the system can adapt as your business grows, refining progressively over time.

Risk reduction. Using excel as data storage may come with some risks due to inaccuracies. For example, an employee forgets to save or upload a file after making some changes.

This can cause inaccurate reporting and documenting, leading to serious trouble down the road. But with EDW, removes the need to worry if everyone has access to accurate and up-to-date information.

Enterprise data warehouse is the centralized data repository of your organization, providing many benefits to the users. It means greater company growth and higher return on investment.