Full Data Warehouse Lifecycle

• Business Analysis
• Architecture Analysis & Review
• Data Modeling
• ETL Development
• Backup, Recovery and Maintenance strategies
• Query and Analysis tool selection and implementation
• Web portal implementation
• Knowledge Transfer

Corporations have undergone wrenching changes during the past decade. Heightened competition, global markets, and deregulation have forced many companies to reengineer the way they do business. Corporations have downsized staff, redesigned business processes, and experimented with new technologies. Some of these approaches have provided a short-term boost, but few have helped companies flourish and achieve a sustained competitive advantage.

Information as a Competitive Weapon -- Increasingly, top executives have recognized that the key to success lies in a company's ability to leverage and manipulate information. They've noticed that firms which exploit data better than the competition are the ones that succeed. Executives are now placing a premium on giving workers access to timely, accurate, and broad-based information about customers, products, operations, and market trends, among other things. Their belief is that, armed with better data, workers will make better decisions that directly impact the bottom line.

Data Warehouse Benefits

Information-hungry corporations are sprouting data warehouses like weeds. These companies see a direct linkage between a data warehouse and long-term profitability. Consequently, the market for data warehouse products and services is growing rapidly. Companies are building data warehouses for various reasons. A large financial institution, for example, has built a data warehouse to better understand and service its largest commercial customers. The bank's warehouse consolidates customer account information from myriad product lines and records all instances of when the customer was contacted, by whom, and for what reason. The data warehouse is helping the bank cement relationships with its most profitable customers and more efficiently cross-sell products and services through a single point of contact.

A large telecommunications company uses data warehouses to analyze calling patterns and help speed new products and services to market. The company maintains a huge central data warehouse from which it spawns mini data warehouses -- or data marts -- to support business unit-specific applications. They also Mass Market, for example, using a data mart to track promotions, inventory, and customer purchases for an innovative new retail business it launched last year that sells music CDs over the telephone and Internet.

The list of potential uses of a data warehouse is endless. For example, a manufacturing firm is building a data warehouse to analyze product defects and improve quality. A cellular carrier is trying to minimize customer turnover by identifying the characteristics of customers most apt to switch services. An insurance company is trying to reduce fraud by scanning claims records for unusual activity. A credit card company is trying to reduce direct mail costs by better predicting which consumers will respond to a new marketing campaign.

The bottom line is that data warehouses are strategic initiatives designed to improve quality, enhance customer service, reduce costs, and increase revenues. For many companies, a data warehouse is the key to achieving market success.

We understand big data

Many customers have enormous amounts of transaction data and other forms of data that can be transformed into valuable business information. Analysts project that data volumes will be 30 times greater than today's levels in a few short years! Where is all this data coming from? The new e-business channel is the primary source, of course, but existing data sources are growing as well, from various channels of customer data to internal sources like finance and human resources. It's a growing challenge for the IT organization and the business units it serves.

The fact is today's data architectures are not truly scalable—information delivery is not timely or accurate, volumes are exceeding the capacity of underlying systems, and application turnover is driving costs higher and higher. What's needed are high-performance, scalable solutions that offer flexibility to adapt as the organization grows and that optimize business processes. That's where Cornerstone comes in.

We deliver high performance and scalability for long-term solutions

Cornerstone’s solutions for high performance rely on a methodology and set of best practices honed through years of managing successful implementations in large, complex data environments.

Cornerstone’s Data Warehouse solutions are:

• Archictected for scalability at all three layers—database, hardware, and application—and built using the most advanced technologies commercially available
• Robust enough to handle extreme volumes of data, provide 24/7 availability, deliver data real-time, and enable direct user access
• Integrated at the back-end —across channels and business units
• Designed for low cost of ownership—scaled correctly from the beginning to save time and expense in the future

We recognize technology as an enabling tool and manage implementations with the business benefit firmly in mind. New tools, methods, and software products enable customers to build solutions in far less time and at a lower cost. Cornerstone utilizes technology and methods that deliver business value quickly, and significantly reduce the cost of implementing and supporting Business Intelligence. Our clients know their project will be properly scoped and planned, with concrete deliverables and a successful outcome. They depend on our strengths in the full development lifecycle, from benchmarking and business case to design and architecture, implementation, testing and rollout, and project management for all phases of the data management process:

• Data acquisition processes
• Data repositories
• Cross-channel data integration
• Information delivery applications
• Warehouse administration

We partner in joint teams with our clients to achieve the best results in an efficient timeframe. Our data warehousing consultants view the client partnership as an important and integral part of the engagement's success. This shared commitment minimizes risk and supports the process of technology transfer.

We serve world-class clients

We're proud to count among our clients some of the nation’s leading companies in financial services, transportation/logistics, health care, manufacturing, e-business, and other industries. Their outstanding references will confirm that Cornerstone consultants are among the most talented in the industry, the results we produced exceeded their expectations, and the goals we met were achieved faster and more cost-effectively than any other alternative they might have considered.

We help close the "knowledge gap"

Cornerstone helps enterprises close what Gartner Group calls the "knowledge gap"—the gulf between the data the enterprise has and the data it can use—the playing field on which organizations will win or lose competitive advantage. Our solutions enable the organization that knows how to manage data and how to deliver it to end users, and thereby gains advantage by becoming smarter, faster, and more flexible.