Real-Time Connected Data Warehouse Made Easy

You’ve been doing the “digital transformation” thing for a couple of years – integrating your business and IT processes and leveraging technology and data in new ways to drive greater operational efficiency and immersive customer experiences. Your users are happy, but management is starting to ask questions about what’s next and how they can pull together the data from across different systems to drive real-time decision-making across your operations. You need a real-time connected data warehouse.

This article is the third in a series of three that talk about how to leverage a real-time connected data warehouse to improve your company’s performance.

The first article talked about developing a 360-degree view of your customers to drive better sales and marketing insights that lead to higher lifetime value and personalized customer experiences.

The second article talked about integrating your IT management systems into a 360-degree view of your IT organization to improve resource utilization, provide better service assurance, and make more informed IT portfolio decisions.

This article will focus on your operations function and how using a real-time connected data warehouse from Actian, you can develop a 360-degree view of your operations and logistics to better support decision-making about your digitally transformed business processes.

Digital Transformation is the First Step Towards Business Agility

Digital Transformation of business is one of the most important IT trends of the past few years. It’s more than process automation, and it’s more than updating your IT solution portfolio to use some new, cool apps.  Digital transformation fundamentally changes the relationship between business processes, users, data, and the IT systems on which they depend. There is no “business process” and “IT process” – the two are inextricably integrated, and one cannot function without the other. That is important for two reasons. The first is that the data involved in your processes represents the knowledge of your organization.  If that knowledge is fragmented, you will encounter challenges. If your organizational knowledge is integrated and shared, you will be able to make better decisions that lead to higher profitability and competitive advantage.

Digital transformation also isn’t a destination – it’s the first step in an evolutionary journey of developing your organization into a modern business that leverages all the resources, assets, and technology available in the marketplace. Digital transformation is the first step – resetting how your company approaches technology. The end goal is business agility – the ability to respond quickly to opportunities and threats in the marketplace – minimizing risk and maximizing value. To achieve this goal, there are three stages you will go through:

1. Digital transformation of your business processes.
2. Integrating your enterprise data in real-time for analytics.
3. Real-time, data-driven decision making.

Developing a Holistic View of Your Business Data

When it comes to your company’s operations – be them manufacturing operations, service delivery, logistics, supply chain orchestration, development of digital products, or internal business processes, developing a 360-degree view of your operations is essential to moving beyond digital transformation towards the real goal of business agility. A real-time connected data warehouse can help you do that with both the tools to connect all of your disparate systems together and a cloud-scale warehouse environment for aggregating and analyzing your data so you can quickly develop actionable business insights.

Consider all of the systems that one of your digitally transformed business processes use – you may have a core platform (such as ERP), you probably have some embedded sensors in machinery, mobile apps, IoT devices, vehicles with GPS tracking, inventory management systems, workflow tracking, demand analysis, quality control, user feedback… the list goes on and on.  Digitally transformed business processes are built on the use of technology – but each of these systems has its own management capabilities, their own data set, and their own analytics.  You may be able to string together a transaction flow to meet the needs of end-users in a business process, but optimizing the technology-enabled process requires a centralized, normalized view of your data – a 360-degree view of your operations.

Why You Need a Connected Data Warehouse

With a real-time connected data warehouse like Actian, you can manage connections to each of your technology components in a centralized and secure way.  Whether the data being produced is streaming or processed in batches, you can bring it together in the warehouse and assemble it into a digital representation of your end-to-end process.  This data can be analyzed in real-time, interpreted, and refined into actionable business insights that operators and management can use to understand how well the process is performing, and where it can be refined for even more exceptional performance.  If your company has ambitions of achieving a state of real business agility, a connected data warehouse can help.

To learn more, visit www.actian.com.

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.