Data Warehousing

The company implementing the Data warehouse is Sears Roebuck & Co. Sears is in the retailing business selling ever thing from under garments to washing machines.

The main reason why the company is implementing the DW is because it wants to maximize the use of its information in its credit data warehouse. The prior application processed steps sequentially one processor at a time thus not using the multiprocessor capabilities of its machine to process the huge quantity of data. Mining of data was too slow and could only be performed once a year, which produced inaccurate data for the Marketing department. Due to the meticulous process, other units of the company were barred from the data warehouse, which also cause dilemmas.

Sears went to a consultant to solve the problem. The package chosen was the Torrent Systems Orchestrate Package. The reason for choosing this package is because the package fit the needs of the company to a match. It allows the company to convert its application from sequential to parallel by partitioning the data across the processors and running multiple, parallel instances of the application.

The benefits from implementing the Orchestrate package is, the new program would examine account attributes like purchasing behavior and payment history, causing more lucrative targeted marketing campaigns and boosting sales and card balances. It will allow the job to be done at a fraction of the time of the prior system. In addition the new system increased the number of credit card accounts from 16 million to 22 million.

Overall, from doing this case study I have learned that data mining and data warehouse's are very important to all organizations especially very large organizations. DW's help to further organize and use the data of the company to its fullest, which allows companies to operate more smoothly and efficiently. I gained a greater knowledge of DW's and how they work and are used by organizations. I understand how the information form DW's are used and is useful to organizations. The only thing the case study did not talk about that I was curious about is the process of choosing the consultant and after that the process of choosing the correct package or solution. Other than that I gained a great deal of knowledge from the case study of the Sears.