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Case Studies
Enterprise Data Warehouse Augments Strategic Decision-Making Capabilities
Project at a Glance |
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RDA developed an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) solution for one of the nation's leading real estate investment trusts that unified data from various sources to greatly reduce labor costs by automating report processing and creating standardized data tracking. Also, report formatting provided management with a clearer, broader view into and across projects. |
About Our Client
RDA's client is one of the nation's leading Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) - developing, redeveloping, acquiring, and managing luxury apartment communities all across the United States.
Background
Executive reporting requirements for our client have increased dramatically as their business has grown. The costs for providing these reports has also increased as well as the complexity of the information sought. Our client sought to employ better use of information and data through the development of a new data warehouse for enterprise reporting and decision support. The solution needed to offer improved scalability, reliability, manageability, flexibility, and usability.
Solution Detail
RDA developed an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) solution leveraging the following technologies:- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for ETL processing
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) for operational and parameterized reporting
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create cubes, Microsoft Office for accessing the cubes, and drill down capabilities
The new EDW provides improvements in the areas of data integration from multiple sources, data quality, data governance, and satisfaction with information delivery to business users. The solution includes generalized core and ad-hoc reporting capabilities, advanced analytics, and executive dashboards.
RDA's responsibilities included all aspects of the project life cycle (requirements analysis, verification, and design; architecture build and testing; report development and testing; support of user acceptance testing and deployment, training documentation and change management/communications; and project management). In addition, RDA was responsible for process definition, tool selection, installation, and training on tools for meta data management, data modeling, and master data management, scaled to fit our client's requirements.
Benefits
The EDW project united many areas of the business. Prior to this work, employees would maintain their own sets of numbers, which caused disagreement on which data was correct. Upon the completion of the EDW, the reporting process for construction projects was largely automated and standardized. Each project is guaranteed to track the same information and present it in the same format. This allows executive management clearer insight into these projects. Prior to the implementation of these reports in the EDW, 40 people often spent days gathering the information required for these reports. This process is now largely automated, allowing them to spend additional time managing their projects rather than compiling reports.
Another new area of analysis created by the EDW project was exposing data not previously available, as well as aggregating data from multiple systems to provide a unified view. One example of this occurred in procurement, where vendor expenses were managed using three separate systems. By combining the data from each of these systems, the procurement office gained a better understanding of which vendors they were spending money with. In addition, the insight it gave into how communities were spending money has enhanced our client's ability to strategically decide which communities were candidates for rehabilitation.
Challenges
The main challenge RDA faced was the large number of different data sources that were required to meet our client's reporting needs. During this project, RDA extracted data from the following systems:- PeopleSoft Financials - General Ledger and Accounts Payable Data
- Foundation - Property Management Data
- Timberline - Construction Accounting, Job Cost and General Ledger
- OPS - Invoice and Order data
- SRC Databases - Construction data
- Lotus Notes Databases - Various information
- Excel Files - Various attributes to supplement the data
RDA's team had to quickly understand the relationships between the systems and how they support the life cycle of a community. This information then needed to be displayed through customer reports built using reporting services and cubes built using analysis services.
Technically Speaking
As specified in the challenges section, numerous source systems were utilized to populate the EDW. This information was correlated using the standard Kimball methodology for EDW and presented to users through SSRS and SSAS. In addition, RDA utilized its prior experience building DW for REIT vendors to ensure that the DW would address our client's business needs.
