CHALLENGE
Our client uses a large-scale enterprise data warehouse for, among other things, reporting to executive management and then industry analysts and the public on key growth metrics. The data warehouse has evolved and grown over time and, due to complexity, the various data feeds have become unstable, the processes undocumented, and the updates time consuming and hardware intensive. All of this has led to uncertainty in the accuracy of daily, weekly, and official public reporting, manual intervention, and a high cost environment.
SOLUTION
We fielded a team consisting of data warehouse experts and consultants extremely familiar with the business metrics and their drivers, and the client’s underlying systems. During the engagement, we documented the data and process flows, identified root cause problems and control weaknesses, validated reporting accuracy issues, identified areas of improvement and a roadmap to increase the reporting accuracy and timeliness as well as reduce processing requirements. Following the assessment, we implemented the recommended improvements.
RESULTS
As a result of the effort and the implementation of the recommendations, the processes were simplified and automated, and the key metric reporting has stabilized and is reliable without concern of restatement, and internal controls have been strengthened. In addition to the key metric reporting, other analytical reporting was improved. Execution of a transformation roadmap to a more modern architecture reduced annual costs by more than 50%.