Value Chain Introduction
Most organizations have an underlying value chain of key business processes. The value chain identifies the natural, logical flow of an organization’s primary activities. For example, a retailer issues purchase orders to product manufacturers. The products are delivered to the retailer’s warehouse, where they are held in inventory. A delivery is then made to an individual store, where again the products sit in inventory until a consumer makes a purchase. Figure 4-1 illustrates this subset of a retailer’s value chain. Obviously, products sourced from manufacturers that deliver directly to the retail store would bypass the warehousing processes.
Figure 4-1: Subset of a retailer’s value chain.
Operational source systems typically produce transactions or snapshots at each step of the value chain. The primary objective of most analytic DW/BI systems is to monitor the performance results of these key processes. Because each process produces...