Crack of dawn

Just want to share my recent objective and its strategy in which we have to impelment BI for Sales subject area very fast, with out purchasing a tool. I recently join this company and my immidiate goal is to provide a BI tool to support thier planning for year 2009.



This document will give you a hint for how to come up with these situations you face.

Objective: To provide a decision support & reporting system for the senior management of trade key, helping to plan 2009, covering trade key Sales subject area by the mid of December 2008.
Start Date: November 10, 2008 Planned End Date: December 15, 2008
Mission Characteristics: The deadlines for the mission completion are very aggressive and extremely facing lack of resources.
Summary: An initial decision support and reporting system should be provided to the stake holders of Trade key, for gaining insights of the trade key Sales. For this purpose the Sales mart should be nailed down for the EDWH for Trade key. The system should be able to support drilling, statistical functions, report -sharing, report export and graphical view of the data. Besides OLAP based reporting, the system should be able to get and export reports from the existing trade key database. Multiple report creation options should be provided for the user for creating reports without relying on the IT people.
Milestones:
· Team buildup
· DSS & MIS reporting tool
· Sales Mart
· Validation and Brush ups
Milestone Strategy:
DSS & MIS reporting Tool
· Search the internet and find any existing open source DSS tool that can be utilized for the mission, next search for re-usable components that can be used as plug and play. Like JPivot, iText, JFreeCharts, Apache HSSF, Jasper Reporting Engine, iReport.
Team Buildup
· Hire eminence data warehouse professionals that can immediately join trade key, and should have experience on developing ETL and OLAP cubes. Knowledge of MDX and SQL is a must.
· Hire mid-level java server side programmers that can develop server side java components on a high-speed and integrate open-source readily available components to develop an initial DSS and MIS system.
· Utilize existing knowledge worker for the Trade key existing database to help construct ETL.
· Utilize existing graph designer for developing DSS and MIS tool.

Sales Mart
Perform fast and effective requirement gathering
· Arrange JAD meetings for fast requirement gathering for identifying sales dimensions and measures.
· Utilize Sales department existing reports
· Thoroughly analyze existing trade key OLTP systems for fact findings.
· Develop an initial cube on an initial Sales dimensional model and generate dummy data, to present reports to the system users to better analyze their data requirements.
Fast Kick-off
· Utilize Pentaho Kettle for Data integration, tool is an open source equipped with rich functions for ETL
· The objective of this mission is to provide DSS for supporting planning for year 2009, so for current interim only develop full-refresh ETL.
· Utilize industry standard best practices for now, without inventing our own.
Validation and Brush ups
· Utilize existing QA resources to validate the source, ware house and OLAP data to create Single Version of truth.
· Create existing manual reports for the Sales team on the system
· Create new reports that may be required for the decision makers.
Compromises
· IE 6-7 dependant software only for some features
· OLAP reports only support MS Analysis Services 2000
· Full Refresh ETL only
· Due to fast requirement gathering, changes to the dimensional model may arise after the system deployment.

This is the abstract strategy document, rest can not be published :)
Syed Saulat Rizvi