Data Warehouse Implementation: Cost Effective Approach for Small Businesses

Abstract

Data is the oil of this era where businesses compete among in order to own the most informative data for gaining competitive advantages and business success. It is where the necessity of using a sophisticated data warehouse arises. However, though there are high end Data warehouses and modern data analytics tools are in the market. It is empirical that most of the small businesses locally and internationally have not implemented a proper data warehouse considering the overhead burden of such an implementation and the technical difficulties involved. Therefore, in this study, it is proposed to provide a low cost, cost effective less complicated data warehouse implementation for any small business entities so as to enable them to leverage the benefit of their business data through the analytics to support the decision making and make the business data driven. The tools employed in this research are office automation tools with other freeware. The results suggest that it is worthwhile for small businesses to implement this architecture for their data analytics purpose. Further research in this area will enable automating the entire process.