OLAP for the masses - online analytic processing - includes related article on push technology being used by Mongomery Securities and Healtheon - Data Management/DBMS - Company Operations

Software Magazine, Nov, 1997 by Susan Mael

For Montgomery Securities, a San Francisco-based investment banking and securities brokerage, business success depends on brokers getting timely access to customer data.

That can't happen if brokers have to wait a week while their custom programming staff queries the mainframe to assemble a report that identifies which customers might be interested in buying a particular stock, or retirement plan. By the time the report reaches the broker the opportunity may have been lost. Worse yet, the broker will realize after reading the report that it was based on faulty assumptions. "It's exactly what I asked for but not what I wanted," says the broker, who promptly sits down with another programmer to refine the query. In the Stone Age this was known as playing "what if" games. But in the Information Age it's simply known as death.

What to do? Why not build a data warehouse, buy some query and OLAP tools, and empower the brokers themselves to run reports? They get to play query games in realtime and the CFO gets to fire the custom programming staff. It's win/win, unless you're a programmer.

When Montgomery migrated to its Windows NT environment two years ago, the company also took the time to build an enterprise reporting system to support its end users. The company anchored it business intelligence system on Actuate Software's Report Server. It enables brokers to search a complex report online even if the information on the report comes from different sources.

According to Fred Winograd, chief technology officer at Montgomery, the company's standard reports include daily accounting reports for the operations area, including the previous day's transactions for its clients. Internal reports include sales information, general operating reports, commission analysis and salary distribution, run on daily, weekly or monthly schedules. Currently these reports are stored in a central repository where users can access the reports relevant to their department. The reports often come from a mix of the company's AS/400, Informix and Sybase databases, but with the Actuate Reporting System, the end users "don't really know from where the data comes, or how to get it integrated into the report. They just know that 'this is where I go to get my reports,'" says Winograd. Once they learn how to use Actuate's desktop viewer, they can access the reports based on security levels, no matter where the data resides.

Giving end users direct access to the information they need to do their jobs can remove the bottleneck that is created by the IS department having to create reports for the entire organization. This is one of the benefits that Wilsonville, Ore.-based manufacturer Tektronix is seeing with Seagate Crystal Info from Seagate Software, which was implemented in March as the main reporting tool for the company's customer service system. Since then, several other groups within the company, including marketing, hu- man resources and finance, have begun to take advantage of the technology. Reports being generated include sales summaries, order management, manufacturing quality, and data accuracy.

The main problem confronting Tom Messenger, Crystal Project Leader, is keeping up with the number of users who want access to the system. Once people see what Seagate Crystal Info can help them do, they're "very interested in getting it as soon as they can," says Messenger. He believes that "benefits of the enterprise reporting structure will accrue as we go down the road." According to Messenger, any tool that takes some of the load off his overburdened IS is good for the organization. "One of the things we want to do as much as possible is push reporting and queries down to the user desktop," says Messenger. At this point, he says, Tektronix has at least nine 'power users' who are able to create their own reports.

Unlike Messenger, who has trouble keeping up with the number of end users wanting electronic access to the reports, Sun Chemical Corp. in Ft. Lee, N.J., has met with some resistance as IS works to encourage end users to embrace their new reporting system. Not everyone is excited about the prospect of having to wade into a data warehouse. Busy executives who are used to picking up the phone to get the information they need don't necessarily going to change their ways. However, says Carlos Cabrera, vice president of information systems, "we're really trying to make it easier for those that are on the other end of the call so they can maybe provide better answers."

Optimizing Data Stores

According to David Fritz, Sun Chemical's manager of data warehousing and reporting, the company has put together two different approaches to data warehousing -- one set up for people managing the business and the other for those operating the business.

According to Fritz, the data warehouse is optimized for things like OLAP and data mining, and is used by accounting, marketing and sales people for ad hoc analysis of a wide variety of business information.

These data warehouses also include a lot of historical information to help users analyze trends. In the sales warehouse, if profit was down in a certain branch last month, the sales manager can see if sales to a particular customer have dropped off or if production costs have risen faster than they can raise prices. The operational data store is used for such tasks as generating monthly industrial-strength financial reports such as statements of earnings, profit/loss and voucher registers, as well as inventory-on-hand and stock status reports. End users accessing departmental data stores can create their own ad hoc queries and reports using the IQ/Objects from IQ Software. On the other hand, because the production reports from the operational data store are often very complex, they are created within the IS department and made available to the appropriate managers.