What exactly does the term Business Intelligence encompass?
Business Intelligence is the process of analyzing meaningful information in order to answer questions about a business. Information Systems known as online analytical processing (OLAP) tools help managers and analysts identify trends, patterns and anomalies in their business’ data.
The trick is knowing which questions to ask. At CornerStar we believe there are “sweet spots” of quality information within every business that when paid attention to, can result in significant improvement in the company’s bottom line. Rather than giving managers all of the information, which would be overwhelming, Business Intelligence provides certain meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) organized around dimensions that are most meaningful to the company (product lines, customer geography).
Is CornerStar a reporting tool?
No. CornerStar provides a pivotal piece in an overall reporting solution that sits between your on-line transaction processing (OLTP) systems and your reporting tools and allows you to see information quickly, easily and in a way that makes sense to your managers.
We do this by combining our expert consultancy with a series of highly flexible, foundational products called Data Marts. We provide the data model and transformation programs to extract all the data from your various source systems into a consistent, clean, reliable model. The result is a separate database designed specifically for Business Intelligence reporting.
CornerStar can work with any of your existing tools or we can offer a turnkey solution with the proper reporting tools already bundled.
Which reporting tools do you work with?
We can work with a variety of analytical, reporting and end-user query tools. For OLAP (on-line analytical processing), we prefer Cognos PowerPlay and have many report templates available for quick implementation. We first evaluate our clients’ existing tool investments and help them get the most value from those existing investments.
For clients who don’t have tools in place, our consultants can refer you to a variety of sources to achieve your reporting objectives. CornerStar also offers a turnkey solution already incorporating pre-bundled reporting tools.
Is CornerStar a Product or a Service?
CornerStar is a little of both. We provide a prepackaged, baseline Data Warehouse foundation that contains approximately 80% of the Business Intelligence requirements shared by most companies. Things like financial statements, sales analysis, financial analysis, etc.
With this foundational product in place our consultants explore the unique characteristics and needs of your business, customizing the baseline foundation to achieve your objectives. For more information on this question, click on How We Work.
What is the correct definition of a Data Warehouse?
A Data Warehouse is a collection of data from potentially different computer systems, organized to represent an analytical view of a company. Data is extracted from the various source systems and run through a process known as transformation to make it clean and consistent.
I already have reporting tools. Why do I need a Data Warehouse?
While it is true you can write a report directly from your ERP system, there are several compelling reasons why a Data Warehouse makes more sense.
What is the difference between a Enterprise Data Warehouse and a CornerStar Data Mart?
An Enterprise Data Warehouse encompasses the entire organization-from planning, purchasing, manufacturing, sales and marketing to financial reporting. Because of this complexity, creating an Enterprise Data Warehouse typically requires two to four years of work and millions of dollars to complete.
In contrast, a Data Mart is focused on a single line of business providing the opportunity for a company to build their Data Warehouse in stages as needed. ROI is rapid and a strong foundation is provided for future expansion. Additionally, since a Data Mart relates to a single area, its features are highly focused on the needs of that department. For example, the CornerStar Sales Mart allows for complete views of sales data including shipments, bookings, backlog, forecasts, quotas and revenue adjustments; consolidated world-wide views of sales; unlimited hierarchies for products, customer and salesperson related fields; historical and current view of dimension data like product line and customer type generally associated with detailed sales transactions.
What happens if we add a new ERP package to our source systems?
The CornerStar Data Warehouse solution is highly portable. The energy spent implementing a CornerStar Data Warehouse at your company, as well as the reports and data cubes that are built on top of the Data Warehouse are not a throw away if you should add a new ERP package to your source systems. The data mapping and extraction process will have to be redone but the transformation logic and data structures as well as all the reports can remain unchanged.
Some of my reports against my ERP system run for a long time and drain the system. Will CornerStar help this?
Absolutely. The key is managing demand on your system. An OLTP (on-line transaction processing) system creates spikes of demand on a CPU. Reporting often results in a larger demand for processing power for a longer amount of time. A CornerStar Data Warehouse removes the reporting database to a separate server, freeing your production system to do its primary job.
I want to archive data from my ERP system. Can CornerStar Data Marts support this?
Yes! CornerStar Data Marts keep all detailed transaction data. Summary tables are then built in the Data Mart from the details. In the future, if data must be summarized differently, the supporting detail is available to do this without going back to the source ERP system.
Can the CornerStar Financial Mart be used as a budgeting and consolidation tool?
Yes. Our Data Model supports up to 5 financial budgets in any given year. We have utilities available to load budgets to our Financial API which in-turn sends them to the Financial Data Mart. Many clients use an Excel front-end for budget entry. Using the Cognos/Excel add-in, you can provide managers with last-year's actuals to aid in creating this year's plan. Another option would be to provide a custom front end for users to enter budgets. CornerStar consultants have the expertise to help with this, including creating a browser based front-end for use over the company’s intranet.
Data Warehouse reduces reporting errors.Data Warehouse enforces a level of discipline that encourages clean and consistent data. Hours of analysis into the way your company does business occurs every time you write even the simplest report directly against your source system. Multiply this by the number of users and reports generated, and you may find that you are pulling the same information several times, sometimes incorrectly and often inconsistently. With a Data Warehouse the difficult analysis has been funneled through the transformation process. Report writing becomes easier and less time-consuming.
Data Warehouse is designed for reporting. Most OLTP systems are designed for very specific business functions like creating sales orders or releasing batches of work orders—not for reporting. A Data Warehouse, on the other hand, is designed specifically for business users to retrieve and analyze large sets of records quickly and easily. The CornerStar model uses descriptive field names like “sold_to_region”. In other words, language that is meaningful and relevant to the user. In addition, CornerStar provides detail data as well as several levels of summarization and pre-calculated values. This makes it easy for non-technical personnel to perform their own ad-hoc queries without the need to create cross-tab reports.
Data Warehouse can consolidate data from multiple source systems. This is a difficult task with most reporting tools. The CornerStar Data Warehouse is designed to consolidate multiple databases into one place to provide a foundation for worldwide reporting.
Data Warehouse can capture historical data that would otherwise be “lost” from your source system. Master file data such as the ship-to address, or customer type can change in your source system and sometimes is not retained in historical files. A CornerStar Data Warehouse provides views to your data using both the current and historical attributes. Also, snapshot type data like sales order backlog or open purchase orders can be captured and trended by our Data Warehouse.
What is the difference between an Enterprise Data Warehouse and a CornerStar Data Mart?
An Enterprise Data Warehouse encompasses the entire organization-from planning, purchasing, manufacturing, sales and marketing to financial reporting. Because of this complexity, creating an Enterprise Data Warehouse typically requires two to four years of work and millions of dollars to complete.
In contrast, a Data Mart is focused on a single line of business providing the opportunity for a company to build their Data Warehouse in stages as needed. ROI is rapid and a strong foundation is provided for future expansion. Additionally, since a Data Mart relates to a single area, its features are highly focused on the needs of that department. For example, the CornerStar Sales Mart allows for complete views of sales data including shipments, bookings, backlog, forecasts, quotas and revenue adjustments; consolidated world-wide views of sales; unlimited hierarchies for products, customer and salesperson related fields; historical and current view of dimension data like product line and customer type generally associated with detailed sales transactions.
What happens if we add a new ERP package to our source systems?
The CornerStar Data Warehouse solution is highly portable. The energy spent implementing a CornerStar Data Warehouse at your company, as well as the reports and data cubes that are built on top of the Data Warehouse are not a throw away if you should add a new ERP package to your source systems. The data mapping and extraction process will have to be redone but the transformation logic and data structures as well as all the reports can remain unchanged.
Some of my reports against my ERP system run for a long time and drain the system. Will CornerStar help this?
Absolutely. The key is managing demand on your system. An OLTP (on-line transaction processing) system creates spikes of demand on a CPU. Reporting often results in a larger demand for processing power for a longer amount of time. A CornerStar Data Warehouse removes the reporting database to a separate server, freeing your production system to do its primary job.
I want to archive data from my ERP system. Can CornerStar Data Marts support this?
Yes! CornerStar Data Marts keep all detailed transaction data. Summary tables are then built in the Data Mart from the details. In the future, if data must be summarized differently, the supporting detail is available to do this without going back to the source ERP system.
Can the CornerStar Financial Mart be used as a budgeting and consolidation tool?
Yes. Our Data Model supports up to 5 financial budgets in any given year. We have utilities available to load budgets to our Financial API which in-turn sends them to the Financial Data Mart. Many clients use an Excel front-end for budget entry. Using the Cognos/Excel add-in, you can provide managers with last-year's actuals to aid in creating this year's plan. Another option would be to provide a custom front end for users to enter budgets. CornerStar consultants have the expertise to help with this, including creating a browser based front-end for use over the company’s intranet.
Our general ledger doesn’t tie into our sales reports so we never seem to be working with the same numbers as Finance. Can CornerStar fix this?
Yes. This is a very common problem caused when the adjustments made to the general ledger at month end don’t flow through to sales order modules. CornerStar solves this problem with a bolt-on Revenue Adjustment Module that ensures your data stays in sync. The Revenue Adjustment Module provides a single user interface that automatically triggers adjustments to all datasets. Tracking revenue adjustments will take you to a real world example of how we solve these problems.
What is a dimensional design?
A dimension is the name we use for a business category such as customer, territory, product, or any predefined time period (YTD, Month to Date, etc.) A dimensional design is a structure that yields a unified and consistent view of these business categories (or dimensions). This type of design is extremely beneficial for organizations where information is distributed across different and sometimes inconsistent departmental and divisional databases.
What is a dimension hierarchy?
The CornerStar Dimension Hierarchy is a tool that lets you simplify and streamline your reporting structures just the way you want them. Rather than having to maintain the same rows on a detailed departmental report, a dimension hierarchy lets you define and redefine the accounts in each row. You easily see the information in the way that most benefits your area of business.