Data Warehousing experience is based on the principles laid down by William Inmon and Ralph Kimble, who codified many of the discipline’s features and jointly pioneered the DW discipline. Key to success is the notion of a centralized, global schema, and the organization of data into "fact and dimension" tables for efficient retrieval of data.

Using these principles for a major agricultural chemical manufacturer, data was extracted daily from a multi-million row SAP structure and an Oracle data base into the appropriate tables, using Microsoft Access as the extraction tool.

Data warehousing instead of Oracle reporting was chosen for its flexibility and speed of processing. Once organized into target groups, such as dealers, distributors, regional sales directors, and salesmen, the data could be presented to target audiences by "slicing and dicing." This allowed each target to see the appropriate data for him or her, ie, a dealer could see sales and commitments only appropriate to his/her territory, likewise for salespeople or the overall picture by region or for the entire enterprise.

These data could also be compared with industry aggregates to determine market penetration. In addition to prepared reports, data could be selected and presented in any customized way as well, but only data defined within the scope of the recipient.

Once the database was segmented appropriately, the presentation of the data became the key element to optimize. It was determined to use Microsoft Visual Basic as the extraction and transmission tool, since it fit neatly with MS Access without additional cost. (MS Access was already included in Microsoft Office Professional suite available on every desktop.)

The data was presented first by FTP to local servers, and later was able to be pulled on demand via an intranet. In this way, a comprehensive, up-to-date, and customer specific reporting mechanism was made to show the latest trend and profit information.