Datawarehouse for analytical CRM

Question

Is it beneficial to pull the data from Datawarehouse for analytical CRM application or it should be pulled from the source systems without the need of Datawarehouse??....Please help me answering.....

Answer 1

Sharing my thoughts on business case to pull from datawarehouse rather than directly from CRM system would be -

1. DWH can hold lot more indicators for Decision making and analysis at enterprise level across various systems than a single system like CRM. Therefore if you want to further your analysis on CRM data you can merge easily information from other system to perform better analytics/BI from DWH.

2. If you want to bring conformity across systems for seeing data of customer with single view. For example, you can have pipeline and sales information from CRM and then perform revenue calculation in another system for the same customer. Its possible that you want both sets of details in single place with same customer record linked to both measures.Then you might want to add Risk (Credit information) from external source into the same record in DWH. It brings true scability in terms of reporting and adhoc requests.

3. Remove the non-core work and dettach the CRM production system from BI and reporting (not talking of specific CRM reports). This has various advantages both terms of operations and convinence. You can google on this subject more to understand the benefits.

For now these are the only points that come to me. I will try adding more thoughts later. P.S: I am more than happy to be corrected :-)

Answer 2

For CRM it is better to fetch the data from datawarehouse. Where a data transformations developed according to the buiness needs using various ETL tools, using this transofrmations you can integrate the CRM analytics for analysing the large chunk of data.

Answer 3

I guess the answer will lie in a few factors

• what data you need,
• the granularity of that data and,
• the ease of extract

If you need data that you will need to access more than one source system, then you will have to do the joining of that data between them. One big strength of getting the data from a DWH, is that they tend to have data from a number of source systems and are well connected across these source systems with busienss rules being applied consistently across them.

A datawarehouse should have lowest granularity data, but sometimes, for pragmatic reasons, decisions may have been taken to partly summarise the data, thus you may not have the approproate granularity.

The big advantage of a DWH is that it is a simle dimensional model structure (for a kimball star schema any how), so as long as the first two are true, I would always get my data from the DWH.

g/l!