Data Warehouse

I had training on Data Warehouse in my company (data warehouse: a computer system that collects, stores, and manages large amounts of data for a company, to be used for business analysis and strategy). I will get to use this tool quite a bit for creating reports, measuring performance of our supplier, making sure we have "the right product at the right place at the right time" (I am getting sick of this phrase), analyzing trends, etc. Well, I have worked with Data Warehouse quite a bit when I was at Graco. I understand the concept and at Graco we have used Cognos Impromptu as a tool to pull together reports, organize needed information from DW in a from of a report (I became quite good at using that tool too).

MCC (Metro Cash and Carry) has it's own datawarehouse as well. It's fairly new in Russia, they have been working on it for only a couple of years. Needless to say, I was not very impressed with it after my training. Many fields are missing from MDW (METRO Data Warehouse), they are still working on expanding it. MDW does not include any information about DC, we can only pull info related directly to stores or suppliers that deliver directly to stores. Note, that most of our suppliers (about 80%) deliver to our DC, so we have to use Access to create reports to measure those suppliers, and rely on data provided by our partners Schenker (we don't have our own DC, don't own it; we partner with Schenker to use their DC facility).

We have to create reports in Data Warehouse itself, not using any tools such as Cognos, but that is ok. It's just that it's a bit challenging. MDW has many terms abbreviated and nobody really knows what they mean. We were given a link to a brochure that explains all the abbreviations used in MDW and what they mean. Now, the brochure is over 1000 pages long. Yes, over 1000 pages. Tell me, who the hell is going to read it so they understand all the abbreviations, huh? It's sad really, I am sure we can get some useful info from MDW if we know how, but not knowing what all abbreviations mean we sure will miss some important measurements/data.

I just went to an introduction training in MDW, I still have to attend advanced/intermediate level. I need to learn how to make my own reports. I have a feeling that working with MDW is going to be a pain. They are struggling with it right now, it does not always work, some data is corrupted/wrong, so IT group is throwing a lot of effort/resources to ensure data integrity. I like to have MDW handy, it's so much easier to use than Access and other programs. I all for having all the information in one source, but it's going to be awhile till I feel totally comfortable with our MDW, right now I don't trust it. But I am glad that they are working on this tool, it will be a great advantage to have it fully and well functioning. Hope I will be here (at MCC) to enjoy the benefits of fully developed MDW.