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Meghadoot Mobile Company

Background

The development and design of a data warehouse is inextricably linked to the business needs of an enterprise. Meghadoot Mobile Company (MMC) is a fictitious company that has a need for an

analytical data warehouse.

Meghadoot Mobile Company has been in business since 1990. Like every Mobile ServiceProvider, the company is searching for new business in an already saturated market.

Distribution channels have been traditionally through direct sales and Franchise outlets. Recently,MMC started offering products through the Internet.

You explore MMC’s business needs more fully as you progress through the design process.

Throughout the remaining practices in this course, you refer to MCC’s issues and requirements tohelp you make critical design decisions.

Business Situation

In January 2005 and later due to WTO agreement implementation there will be drastic changes atMMC business. Due to increased competition it is expected that Sales will be lower than theyhave been in the previous years. The flagship products may become out-dated and may not dowell in market.

The vice president of sales and marketing wants to understand what is driving the business. Hewants to know the reason for sales spikes. Sales volumes that may be generated through theInternet, but wants to know whether this channel is introducing new clients to MMC or whether itis acquiring other channels.

The president is concerned because the aggregate margins may shrink and therefore may hit thebottom line and top lines of the company.

Technology is changing very fast and may see more and more domestic and foreign competitors .

Business Objectives

In strategic discussions, managers articulate the objectives and goals for the company, for thesupply side–Inventory Management, Planning and Operations–and for the demand side–salesand marketing. MMC has chosen to focus on the demand side for the initial warehouseimplementation.

Information Requirements

Through interviews and the requirements-building process, you have identified the followinginformation needs:

•  Analyze industry trends and target specific market segments. • Identify best and worst sellers. • Identify sales opportunities through custom package offerings or by capitalizing on buying

trends. 

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• Identify product trends and develop a channel strategy. •  Analyze sales over multiple promotional cycles. •  Analyze sales channels and increase profits. 

These provide a guideline to your design both in the data that should be included and thearrangement of that data to support this analysis.

Meghadoot Mobile Company Value Proposition

 After much discussion and evaluation, the management of MMC identified its greatest businessopportunities that could be addressed through a data warehouse.

The proof-of-concept deliverable for MMC wants to analyze Customer Behavior to understand thefollowing issues:

Product Strategy: What products are selling? What products should we offer?

Customer Identification: Who are our customers, what are they buying

Objective

In this practice you learn how to identify source data for your data warehouse. While discoveringthe source databases, you adjust your warehouse to schema to accommodate the limitations andconstraints of the data that is available.

In this practice, you:

• Design the logical model for the data warehouse for MMC.

• Identify the subject area for MMC data warehouse application. • Design a conceptual model. • Create the logical model. 

Next you will design the physical model for the data warehouse for MMC.

• Identify the attributes for the data warehouse logical model. • Map the source data from the OLTP model to the data warehouse model. • Identify any data transforms. 

Review

Creating the logical database design involves:

• Choosing primary keys • Mapping entities to tables • Mapping attributes to columns • Mapping relationships to foreign keys • Choosing subtype options (and identifying any inheritance properties) • Choosing optimality • Choosing candidate index columns 

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Note: Although indexes are not strictly part of logical design, in reality they are usually identifiedat this stage.

Begin your design by identifying the subject areas of your business to be implemented in the first(current) increment. Consider only the business view of the information requirements. Your perspective needs to be independent of any implementation constraints or concerns at this stage.

Subject areas are building blocks that are uniquely identifiable and usable across the business.These subjects need to be founded on long-term, stable business concepts.

Note: The subject areas become the dimensions of the star model.

The logical design may consider implementation consequences. Changes need to be made to thelogical model for technical reasons, such as:

• Scope of the data warehouse • Business entities and attributes • Business rules, domain, cardinality • Relationships between business entities • Referential integrity rules 

MCC Subject Areas

From the MCC business case, the following subject areas have been identified for the conceptualmodel:

• Customer 

• Time

• Place

•  Age

• Gender 

• Consumption level

• Customer type

• Customer occupation

• Credit level

• Business brand

• Business category

 Although it may be tempting to create the entities for the warehouse from existing systems, youneed to define the entities from the subject areas identified by your specific analysis of businessrequirements. These entities become the dimensions of your warehouse model.

The next step in creating your conceptual model is to identify the relationship within each entityand between entities. The relationships are important in this model, as your starting point.

Identifying the Attributes

Now that you have identified the entities and relationships between them from the outlinedbusiness requirements you can now determine in your what sort of conceptual model, informationabout each entity is of interest. The attributes are the descriptors in the entity. Attributes may alsobecome primary and foreign key values.

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The data warehouse may contain:

• Descriptive attributes such as name, Occupation, and Credit Limit • Key attributes such as order and people identifiers • Level indicators 

Key values are determined in your next step.

Note: The attributes of entities ultimately become the table columns in the logical model.

Identifying the Critical Business Measures

The critical measures of the business are the facts by which the business is evaluated. Consider different ways the business might need to be viewed as you define these measures. For exampleconsider:

• Internal measurements such as salesperson quota, or percentage of default Payments •

Customer measures such as discounts extended, or days between order and receipt 

• Marketing information that may include demographic data, or industry trends The key performance measures represent the direct results of a business event and not ananalysis about what the event means.

Note: These measures typically become the attributes of the fact table.

Defining the Keys

Your entity relationship model now contains the:

• Relationships between entities •  Attributes for each entity •  A list of measures

• Derived data attributes to hold calculated values Map Source System to Subject Area

 As you consider which system can provide the warehouse with data, conduct a life cycle mappingof sources to the subject areas. For example, looking at the Order Entry System for GlobalComputing Company, you see that the Customer subject area is created, updated, and readthrough this system.

You should assess each source system for its viability to act as an accurate, continuing source of data by evaluating the source system’s:

•  Application type, whether package or custom •  Architecture, whether open or proprietary •  Age • Database size and growth pattern • Maintenance history 

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• Size of user base and criticality of data •  Audit quality 

These measures indicate the long term stability of the system as a data provider for thewarehouse.