Data Warehouses And Real-Time Intelligent Reporting - Not Just For Enterprise

Data Warehousing is now within reach for SME’s.

Having current and actionable analytics from your business has moved from a nice to have to a must have in recent years, there is little regard for the monthly Excel report delivered 2 weeks after the end of the month. In 2024 we expect more than that from the various software applications we use within our businesses each day.

While SaaS apps like SalesForce, BambooHR and Xero have their own dashboards and reporting, it can be a challenge to see the entire business view without moving back into our near 40 year history of Excel and the world of copy paste errors that comes with.

Data warehousing has been solving these issues for enterprise for many years, providing a central store for all organisational data needed to provide actionable reports and analytics for business planning. Reporting tools such as PowerBI then connect to the warehouse to provide a visual reporting experience.

                          Figure 1 - Microsoft PowerBI Dashboard

Previously large enterprise organisations running data warehousing required data analytics teams to own and run the required infrastructure and manage the data extraction processes across multiple applications.

This data warehousing ability is now within reach for SME’s, the total cost of ownership of data warehousing solutions has dropped dramatically in recent years. Modern SaaS solutions, API* access and purpose-built data warehousing tools from Microsoft and Amazon have made the entire process a lot more straightforward and cost effective to architect and maintain.

* (Application Programming Interfaces – effectively a secure way for applications to talk to each other)

Another benefit of data warehousing is the ability to maintain your own data long term and across multiple software platform changes. If you have ever transitioned finance platforms you would be aware of the difficulty in looking at year on year report comparisons across the change in software.

An example of how a modern SME data warehouse works is below. The workflow pulls data from multiple applications in multiple different formats utilising Data Factories (Microsoft’s Extract, Transform & Load product) to extract data from applications and transfer this data through to the Database (Data Warehouse).

A dashboarding and reporting tool such as PowerBI or a bespoke data visualisation web interface connects to the data warehouse to provide your business with the insights it requires. This whole process is automated and can mean the data you are looking at is accurate, consistent and up to date.

                               Figure 2 - Microsoft Data Warehousing

Owning all your organisation’s data and using it to provide intelligence is now available to all sizes of business. To start unlocking your data driven insights get in contact with the Digital Transformation team at VInet.