Overview

As I have said before, the Wal-Mart data warehouse project is never finished. It is like the TV commercial selling batterieswith the pink bunny: "It keeps going and going and going.?" Other companies clearly stop after their firstimplementation of the data warehouse. Why didn't Wal-Mart stop development? There are some key differentiating points?such ascompany culture, a desire to improve the business, innovation, and hunger for information?that contribute to the continualdevelopment of the data warehouse into an enterprise data warehouse. Culture is a driving factor, but for Wal-Mart, one of the mainmotivators was their ROI analysis, which quantified the payback. After they understood the payback, it was used as a key part ofother newly developed applications.

There are two sections in this chapter. The first, "The ROI Surrounded by Chaos," reveals the events thatunfolded after Wal-Mart realized the data warehouse was very successful. I will discuss some of the events leading up to the ROIanalyses, the ROI, and how they planned to integrate the data warehouse after the ROI was completed. The secondsection,"Integrating Operational Applications," describes another differentiation between Wal-Mart and othercompanies, namely, the way that they have integrated their data warehouse into all the facets of their operation. With the ROI,Wal-Mart understood the value of the information and took further action to exploit this information. I am going to discuss someclassical applications that were integrated into the data warehouse. There are many examples of enterprise data warehouseintegration, but I will discuss the replenishment process, the traiting system, the perpetual...