Enterprise Wide Data Warehouse Delivers Integrated, Multi-System Reporting with Full Visibility into the Business

A large Midwest equipment financing company, and previous Dunn Solutions customer, was struggling with an incomplete data mart project led by another IT consulting firm. The data mart was the initial step for a much larger enterprise wide data and reporting plan. Dunn was engaged to provide an analysis of the data mart and reported that the project was failing due to insufficient ETL procedures and a lack of scaling ability. Dunn took over as the solutions partner, purchased the appropriate ETL tool, established a new project timeline and successfully reworked the data mart.

Dunn was then asked to continue on as the partner for the larger project: an Enterprise Wide Data Warehouse (EDW). The objective was to combine the data from the company's four unrelated systems into one location that would then produce real-time reports featuring data from across the enterprise. These systems serve various parts of the business lifecycle and the lack of visibility into or across the data was an impediment to informed decision making.  The reporting capabilities resulting from the EDW would greatly empower those decisions.

The company had a committed internal project leadership team that featured three stakeholders responsible for signoffs and two project sponsors, including the CFO, who "owned" the project. As a result of this cross-functional and highly invested team, the critical planning and design phase of the project effectively took into consideration "the big picture," reviewing all processes and identifying the priorities for project rollout, resulting in six planned iterations.

The project's First Iteration addressed the lease application and contract management processes. The Second Iteration addressed assets management (leased items). The Third Iteration addressed month-end reconciliations while the remaining three iterations addressed the multiple workout processes that manage the delinquent contracts.

The skillful design and thoughtful strategy of the completed EDW resulted in reporting capabilities that now empower managers to make quick and informed business decisions based on facts and figures, rather than assumptions and estimations.