Complete Decision Support Systems

Complete Decision Support Systems

All truly valuable Decision Support, Data Warehouse, and Analysis & Reporting systems are custom. Each business is different. Each business is striving for competitive advantage. Information is an important factor in gaining an advantage over competitors. The costs of creating a strategic system can be controlled only if led by someone who has years of experience delivering similar systems, and has had the time to develop an effective process. Garrett Information Services offers a product that is the next step in the ongoing evolution of decision support systems. It is a complete decision support / data warehouse / analysis & reporting system designed to be customized for any organization, and can reside on the organization's computers, or hosted on ours. It's designed for organizations that have grown to the point where gathering the right information for managers has become manual, difficult, and error-prone. The most common reason for this is the addition of isolated new computer systems over the years due to growth and / or acquisition. Often, when this point is reached, the organization does not have the full set of skills and experience necessary to successfully implement and/or maintain a remedy for this situation at a predictable cost. This product applies to medium and large companies who are having difficulty utilizing their information resource effectively, and includes includes:

Project Definition - prioritization of the most important information
Business Analysis / Data Analysis - documenting the location and meaning of the organization's data
Data Transformation - combining / reorganizing the main sources of data within an organization (including tracking changes to that data)
ETL Process - ongoing, automated extract, transformation, load process
Database Design / Creation - the tables to store your decision support information
Query Tool - end user tool to perform ad-hoc analysis and reporting
Training - on whatever your people need to be trained on
Customized Report Creation - focusing on the overall performance of the organization as well as exceptions that need to be attended to
Dashboard - easy-to read business measures updated each morning
Documentation - all data elements
(Optional) System Hosting - the database and / or daily operations
(Optional) - Ongoing Maintenance - evolution of the system

This can be done at a fixed price due to a set of templates and shortcuts created by years of experience in delivering successful data warehouse projects in many industries. A highly skilled business analyst, data analyst, data architect, database administrator, data transformation developer, and query tool expert will use these templates and shortcuts to streamline the development of the system. It is not a product that can be purchased on a cd or dvd disc, installed, and utilized by anyone, since data warehousing is a complex process that must be highly customized to the specific needs of each organization in order to deliver the highest return on investment. Instead, it is a predictable process that results in a complete data warehouse / datamart / decision support / reporting system.

Once the system has been created, it MUST be maintained / evolved as the business and world change. GIS will either make sure the client organization's people are trained to perform these tasks, or will do them on an ongoing basis for a monthly subscription fee.

The expertise of GIS makes the decision support process predictable for all organizations, and within reach for many organizations that have previously been unable to pursue them. It is a product that empowers decision makers by allowing them to see the right information at the right time.