Data Warehousing and CRM

Data Warehousing and CRM

Fiercer competition has forced many companies in pay greater attention to retaining customers and winning new ones. Customer loyalty programs have become the Norm Companies at moving away front mass marketing to one-on-one marketing. Custom focus has become the watchword. Concentration on customer experience and custom intimacy has become the key to better customer service. More and more companies embracing customer relationship management ((RM) systems. A number of leading vendors offer turnkey CM solutions that promise to enable one-on-one service to customers. 

Integrated Data Warehouse- Knowledge Repository

Figure 3-8 Integration KM and Data Warehouse 

When your company is gearing up to be more attuned to high levels of customer ser-vice, what Can you, as a data warehouse architect, do'? II' you already have a data \yore-house. how must you readjust it? If you are building a new data warehouse, what arc the factors for special emphasis? You will have to make your data warehouse more focused on the customer. YOU will haVe to make your data warehouse CRM-ready, not an easy task by ally means. In spite of the difficulties, the payoff from a CM-ready data warehouse is substantial. 

CRM-Ready Data Warehouse: - Your data warehouse must hold details of every transaction at every touch point with each customer. This means every unit of every sale of every product to every customer must be gathered in the data warehouse repository. Yon not only need sales data in detail but also details of every other type of encounter with each customer In addition to summary data, you have to load every encounter with every customer in the data warehouse. Atomic or detailed data provides maximum flexibility for the CRM-Ready data warehouse.  Making your data warehouse CRM-Ready will increase the data volumes tremendously. Fortunately, today's technology facilitates large volumes of atomic data to be placed across multiple storage management devices that can be accessed through common data warehouse tools. 

To make your data warehouse CM-ready, you have to enhance some other functions also. For customer-related data, cleansing and transformation functions are more involved and complex. Before taking the customer name and address records to the data ware-house, you have to parse unstructured (Iota to eliminate duplicates.

Combine them to from distinct households, and enrich them with external demographic and psycho-graphic data, these are major efforts. Traditional data warehousing tools are not quite suited for the specialized requirements of customer-focused applications.

Data Warehousing and KM

Data Warehousing and KM

If I998 marked the resurgence of FRP systems, 1999 marked the genesis of knowledge management (KM) systems in many corporations. Knowledge management is catching on very rapidly. 

Operational systems deal with data informational systems such as data warehouses empower the users by capturing, integrating, storing, and transforming, the data into useful information for analysis and decision making. Knowledge management takes the empowerment to a higher level. It completes the process by providing users with knowledge to use the right in at the right time, and at the right place.

Knowledge Management:-  Knowledge is actionable information. What do we mean by knowledge management? It is a systematic process for capturing, integrating, organizing, and communicating knowledge accumulated by employees. It is a vehicle to share corporate knowledge so that the employees may be more effective and be productive there works. Where does the knowledge exist in a corporation? Corporate procedures, documents, reports analyzing exception conditions. Objects math models, what-if eases, text streams, video clips—all of these nod many none such instruments contain corporate knowledge.

A knowledge management system must store all such knowledge in a knowledge repository, sometimes called a knowledge warehouse. If a data warehouse contains structured information, a knowledge warehouse holds unstructured information. Therefore, a knowledge management framework must have tools for searching and retrieving unstructured information.

Data Warehousing and KM:- As a data warehouse developer, what .are your concerns about knowledge management? Take a specific corporate scenario. Let us say sales have dropped in the South Central region. Your Marketing VP is able to discern this from your data warehouse by running some queries and doing some preliminary analysis. The vice president does not know why the sales are down, hut things will begin to clear up if, lust at that time, and he or she has access to a document prepared by an analyst explaining why the sales are low and suggesting remedial action. That document "contains the pertinent knowledge, although this is a simplistic example. The VP needs numeric informal Um, but something more as well.

Knowledge, stored in a free unstructured format, must be linked to the sale results to provide context to the sales numbers from the data warehouse, with technological advances in organizing. Searching and retrieval of 'unstructured data, more knowledge philosophy will enter into data warehousing. Figure 3-S shows how you can extend your data warehouse to include retrievals from the knowledge repository that is part of the knowledge management framework of your company.

Now, in the above scenario. the VP can get the information about the sales drop from the data warehouse and then retrieve the relevant analyst's document from the knowledge repository. Knowledge obtained from the knowledge management system can provide context to the information received from the data warehouse to understand the story tic hind the numbers.

Data in ERP Packages

Data in ERP Packages:-  A remarkable feature or an ERP package is that it supports practically every phase of the day-to-day business aim enterprise from inventory control to customer billing, from human resources to production management, from product costing to budgetary control. Because of this feature, ERP packages are huge and complex. The ERP applications collect and integrate lots of -corporate data. As these are proprietary applications, the huge volumes of data ale stored in proprietary formats available for access only through programs written in proprietary languages. Usually, thousands of relational database tables are needed to support all the various functions.

Integrating ERP and Data Warehouse:- In the early 1990s, when ERP was introduced, this grand solution promised to bring about the integrated corporate data repositories companies were looking for. Because all data was cleansed, transformed, and integrated III (me place, the appealing vision was that decision making and action taking could take place limn one integrated environment. Soon companies implementing ERP realized that the thousands of relational database tables designed and normalized for running the business operations. Were not at all suitable for providing strategic information. Moreover, ERP data repositories lacked data from external sources and from other operational systems in the company. If your company has ERP or is planning to get into ERP, you need to consider the integration of ERP with data warehousing.

Integration Options:- Corporations integrate ERP and the data warehouse initiatives usually adopt one of three options shown in Figure 3-7. ERP' vendors have begun to complement their packages with data warehousing solutions. Companies adopting Option I implement the data warehousing solution of the ERP vendor with the currently available functionality and await the enhancements. The downside to this approach is that you may be waiting forever the enhancements. In Option 2, companies’ implement customized data warehouses and use third-party tools to extinct data from the ERP data sets. Retrieving and loading data from the proprietary ERP data-sets is not easy. Option 3 is a hybrid approach that combines the functionality provided by the vender's data warehouse with additional functionalities from third-party loots.

You need to examine these dace approaches carefully and pick the one most suitable kir your corporation.