Retail BIDA

SKA software solutions have developed a complete Business Intelligence Data Architecture (BIDA) solution for the retail industry. It is a data architecture for business intelligence and is the necessary foundation of any strategy for information-based processes in the enterprise. The SKA BIDA incorporates all of the components required to design and develop an integrated store of data in an enterprise data warehouse as well as a range of common reports and analytical applications required to exploit that data.

• BI4Retail comprises a fully populated dimensional database schema for a retailer.
• BI4Retail Engines are powerful derived data schemas that are integrated into the atomic-level enterprise schema and perform analytical and predictive analysis for sales analysis, campaign analysis, customer segmentation analysis and category management.
• SeETL is a powerful mapping tool that automates the process of mapping the data from source to target and generates the specifications for the ETL sub-system.
• RetailReports is a suite of business reports specific to the retail sector.

The SKA approach is to perform extensive prototyping. Our experience has been “If you cannot build the prototype you cannot build the real thing.” SKA brings to the table the tools and techniques to build a large scale, and if the hardware is provided, full sized prototype prior to the development of a ‘production database’ or ‘production ETL subsystem’. Experience has shown that the development of the ‘production ETL subsystem’ and the cycle of change to the data model and change to reports and then change to the ETL subsystem is one area where many project have hit ‘stormy waters’. Hence the development of tools to avoid those stormy waters and to reduce the cost and risk of the development of the EDW by allowing the development of a large scale usable prototype prior to incurring the expense of the deployment of the production database and development of production ETL.