Henry Schein Inc.: The Business - Case Study

Case Study Questions

1. What are some of the key requirements for building a
good data warehouse? Use Henry Schein Inc. as an
example.

Answer:

Besides having the right skills, the other top priority was
ensuring data quality. “It seems kind of obvious,” says Harding,
“but sometimes these projects forget about quality, and then
the data warehouse ends up being worthless because nobody
trusts it.” So at the outset of the project, the team interviewed
about 175 potential business users to determine the information
they needed to access and the reports they wanted to see.
Plus, the team analyzed the old paper reports and the condition
of the data housed in the company’s core transaction system.
Monahan says those steps brought to light the importance of
cleansing data in a system that’s designed for transactional purposes
but not suitable for a data warehouse. That led to a long
period of standardizing transactional codes in order to produce
the sales reporting that business analysts needed.


2. What are the key software tools needed to construct
and use a data warehouse?

Answer:

Of course, building a data warehouse is a never-ending
job. New companies are acquired, products are added, customers
come and go, and new features and enhancements
are ongoing. But from an IT standpoint, the data warehouse
is complete and has 85 percent of the data from the
core transactional system. The next major goal is to provide
the European operation with its own data warehouse system
and tie it into the one in the United States.


3. What is the business value of a data warehouse to
Henry Schein? To any company?

Answer:

One of the most valuable features of the data warehouse
has been the ability it gives users to add more fields to reports
as they are using the system. “Once you create a basic
report, draw a conclusion, and drill further based on those
assumptions, it allows you to use that data and go even further,
as opposed to creating a new report, and another and
another,” Ferraro says. The IT department used to create,
edit, revise, run, download, reprogram, and print piles of paper
reports—daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly—for the
analysis of sales and market trends. But today, business users
search, sort, and drill down for that information themselves
in a fraction of the time. The data warehouse has become “a
part of our culture,” says Harding. “It’s got that kind of aura
about it within the company.”