Question

Your industrial supply company wants to create a data warehouse where management can obtain a single corporate-wide view of critical sales information to identify bestselling products, key customers, and sales trends. Your sales and product information are stored in several different systems: a divisional sales system running on a Unix server and a corporate sales system running on an IBM mainframe. You would like to create a single standard format that consolidates these data from both systems. In MyMISLab, you can review the proposed format, along with sample files from the two systems that would supply the data for the data warehouse. Then answer the following questions:
• What business problems are created by not having these data in a single standard format?

• How easy would it be to create a database with a single standard format that could store the data from both systems? Identify the problems that would have to be addressed.

• Should the problems be solved by database specialists or general business managers? Explain.

• Who should have the authority to finalize a single company-wide format for this information in the data warehouse?

Answer 1

Answer:

Industrial supply company scenario:

• The company wants to create a data warehouse where management can obtain a single corporate-wide view of critical sales information to identify best-selling products in specific geographic areas, key customers, and sales trends.
• The sales and product information are stored in both a divisional sales system running on a Unix server and a corporate sales system running on an IBM mainframe.
• The desire is to create a single standard format that consolidates these data from both systems.

Business problems:

• A business problem that can arise from not having these data in a single standard format is that employees will see the data as inconsistent.
• It is difficult to make business decisions if the data is unreliable, inaccurate, or redundant.
• The product descriptions are formatted differently so managers and employees might get confused when it is entered into the system.
• Also, the system identifies the sales by territory in the United States so it would be impossible to identify the sales or even around the world.
• The corporate sales system also lacks a way to identify the identification of the customer.
• Both sales system should be consistent with the information in order to prevent redundancies or inaccuracies.  

How easy it would be to create a database with a single standard format:

• Creating a database with a single standard format would ideally be easy.
• Data quality audits and data cleansing should be performed when constructing the new database.
• Data quality audits and data cleansing would correct any redundancies and inaccuracies in the current systems.
• By using data-cleansing software, the company can combine and integrate the data from all the systems into a single standard format that is uniform throughout the whole company.

Problems that should be addressed:

• A problem that should be addressed is the product description and sales territory tags.
• These tags have different formats which could lead to inconsistencies in the data.
• The names would have to be changed so that they are the same format and are only entered once in the new single standard format database.
• Another problem that would have to be addressed is keeping both the division and customer id tags in the new database.
• This would provide more information for each entry and would limit any confusion among the employees.

Database specialists:

• Database specialists will help solve the problems by performing the data quality audits and data cleansing.
• They will also help in establishing an information policy and developing the new database.
• They are also responsible for the specific policies and procedures through which data can be managed as an organizational resource.
• This involves overseeing logical database design and data dictionary development, planning for data, and monitoring how information systems specialists and end-user groups use data.

General business managers:

• General business managers would have the final say when managing data resources.
• They would be responsible for defining and organizing the structure and content of the database and maintaining the database.

Who should have the authority?

• The general business managers should have the authority because they are responsible for the data.
• This would mean that even though they allow database specialists to establish an information policy and develop the new database, the managers are the ones who have to approve the final product in order for it to be implemented company-wide.
• The managers are the ones whose reputations are on the line when a company succeeds or fails, so they should have the final authority.