Accumulating Snapshot for Order Fulfillment Pipeline
The order management process can be thought of as a pipeline, especially in a build-to-order manufacturing business, as illustrated in Figure 6-18. Customers place an order that goes into the backlog until it is released to manufacturing to be built. The manufactured products are placed in finished goods inventory and then shipped to the customers and invoiced. Unique transactions are generated at each spigot of the pipeline. Thus far we’ve considered each of these pipeline activities as a separate transaction fact table. Doing so allows you to decorate the detailed facts generated by each process with the greatest number of detailed dimensions. It also allows you to isolate analysis to the performance of a single business process, which is often precisely what the business users want.
However, there are times when business users want to analyze the entire order fulfillment...