The global economy, the markets operating there and the flow of goods are moving and changing at a breathtaking pace. There is an abundance of information, market data and indicators. This is why the ability of companies to draw the right conclusions from the multitude of data and act in real time is becoming a real competitive advantage. The trend towards real-time analyses and decisions now plays a central role in the modern business intelligence landscape. This is made possible by technological advances such as the IoT (Internet of Things), cloud computing, modern data management platforms and new methods such as ELT (Extract, Transform, Load), which is used in the course of implementing data lakes and with the help of which so-called data scientists immediately recognize errors and derive reliable developments and trends.
Traditional reporting, classically located in the data warehouse, is more of a retrospective process. The IT department is responsible for this. It collects historical data, fixed key figures and hard facts periodically from the source data and evaluates them according to clear specifications for classic company reporting. The result: companies use OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) to make quick and accurate decisions along predefined evaluation paths, also known as dimensions.