1. Emerson Process Management, a global supplier of measurement, analytical, and monitoring instruments and services based in Austin, Texas, had a new data warehouse designed for analyzing customer activity to improve service and marketing. However, the data warehouse was full of inaccurate and redundant data. The data in the warehouse came from numerous transaction processing systems in Europe, Asia, and other locations around the world. The team that designed the warehouse had assumed that sales groups in all these areas would enter customer names and addresses the same way. In fact, companies in different countries were using multiple ways of entering quote, billing, shipping, and other data. Assess the potential business impact of these data quality problems. What decisions have to be made and steps taken to reach a solution?
2. 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?