Background - Part 1 The company Norsk Datautsalg A / S (NODAS) is a company that specializes in sales of computers and accessories in Norway. They have evolved from a small company of three employees to one medium-sized company of 65 in a furious development in recent years. Last year, the company implemented a ERP system to keep track of the items shipped and to make it easier to make purchases to the warehouse, as well as enable extraction of sales figures. The company has a marketing department, a customer center, a tender department (which secures sales agreements with larger companies and public enterprises), an IT department and a logistics department as both buys and sends out goods. The company has a number of challenges when it comes to purchasing and sales despite its newly developed ERP system. Among other things, the company struggles with the fact that they buy large quantities of goods that are not necessarily sell so well, and they also have trouble predicting how many items will be sold at Christmas time, with the result that the warehouse is often filled up with too many, or too few, of some goods. At the same time, it is a major job for the marketing department to report on the effects of the marketing campaigns as the extracts made from the ERP system often come in a difficult layout in a spreadsheet and must be worked on a lot to make sense. Often several lists need to be washed together to get all the numbers you want for each report.

Exercise 1.1 You have been commissioned by NODAS to help them with the development of a data warehouse. In that way need they to know some terms within Data Warehouse and SAP. Briefly explain what these expressions are means, in your own words, so that employees, with limited knowledge of data warehousing, understand: a) Info Provider b) InfoObject c) Data Store Object d) InfoCube e) Dimensions Expected length: Approx. 400 words

Exercise 1.2 NODAS wants to visualize and explain the opportunities that lie in acquiring one data warehouse. a) Make a star chart that shows your assumption of how the information model of NODAS will typically be able to look like, which solves some of the challenges NODAS has today. Points too what opportunities does this model provide for further reporting. b) Explain, in your own words, the difference between Characteristics and Key Figures with based on the star chart you have drawn.

Exercise 1.3 Name some technologies within data warehousing and data analysis that NODAS can benefit from knowing about, related to the challenges they face today. Also describe why you think these technologies are useful for NODAS.