1) Cost and Effort Reduction

Reduce Efforts and Cost for Implementation in case of new projects for Data marts inclusion. Reduces the cost and time of a Project that aims to include a data mart to the existing environment in future. Dollar Spending will be reduced towards the below tasks in case of any future Data Mart Inclusions. Analysis Time will be reduced to arrive at the Dimensions considered as Conformed Dimensions. Logical and Physical Design Time will also be reduced. Implementation time will be reduced towards developing the code for loading these tables. Review and testing time will be reduced. Data will be made consistent across Data marts. Data flows from the Conformed dimensions to marts will be consistent with format, quality and quantity across the enterprise. The Data warehouse Bus Architecture (DWBA) which is suggested as the best architecture can be followed for long term benefits. Individual Data marts can be integrated in future

Note: The Time taken to bring a new table with a scratch design with all the above four steps will be close to 14 days 112 Person Hours.

2) Maintenance Cost Reduction Enhancement at Single point

Two changes that the Enterprise wide Data Warehouse should be flexible to handle with low cost and effort are a. Adding New Fields to the existing Dimensions like Product, Vendor, Organization etc which can be Shared or conformed. b. Change in Hierarchical arrangements (Ex: Product Re-categorization or Business Unit ReOrganization) existing for the dimensions. Conformed dimensions will make the EDW handle these changes that benefits the below. Less Maintenance Cost towards incorporating the same change across multiple Data Marts. Reducing the Implementation Time. Avoid Data redundancy across the Data Marts. Avoid data to go Inconsistent across Data marts. Over a period of time this will affect business decisions taken from the inconsistent data. Resolving the data inconsistencies. Saves the monitoring time of the Loads for the conformed at independent Data marts level.

3) Data De-Duplicate
Conformed Dimensions act as a Single Point of Common or Shared Source of information for all Data Marts in future. The same data is will not stored repeatedly at multiple points for individual access. Conformed Dimensions will act as a Integration Point of all the Data Marts storing the data at one place avoiding data duplicates and providing a shared across for multiple Data marts rather than being a dedicated source of information within the Data marts.

4) Storage Space
Conformed Dimensions reduces the storage space on the Database to a large extent. In future the current Enterprise level Data warehouse will be scalable to a large extent to get integrated with a lot of individual Data Marts. This will end up storing the same Dimensional Information at multiple points thereby increasing the Storage space and cost for space usage. For Example, if 8 dimension tables are identified to be conformed, this can store 3 GB of information. It will be 45 GB of Database space for 45 Individual Data marts.

5) Server Usage
The Server usage to load the dimension tables at each Data mart level will be more. Conformed Dimensions will reduce the below costs as a Soft Dollar savings. Reduced Load on Source Database server to build the conformed dimension table. Reduced Load on Network during Data Access from Source to build the Conformed Dimension tables. Reduced Load on Informatica Server to build the conformed dimension tables.

6) Overcoming Data Inconsistencies

The individual Data Mart arrangement storing the dimension tables will cause data inconsistencies due to difference in the load timings. In this arrangement some data marts get loaded with the latest information and present the analytics in reports. The other data marts will be showing a data analytics different from the other on the same day. Data will be reported inconsistently on the same day at different departments. The consolidated business decisions taken across departments will not be perfect due to data inconsistencies.

Conformed Dimensions overcome this scenario towards

Acting as a Shared Dimension and integrating all Data marts (Departments) thereby providing consistent information across data marts for reporting analytics.

7) Overcoming Independent Data Islands

Conformed Dimensions overcome the data marts to be isolated within the enterprise. Instead they act as a point that enables the Enterprise Warehouse the Integrate the Data Marts across the Enterprise. This will result in Data Warehouse Bus Architecture (DWBA) which will provide a easy management to data marts.