With ever-increasing volumes of data manufacturing organisations need an effective way to process it in a timely way. Online analytical processing (OLAP) combined with data warehousing technology brings together data from several departments within the organisation such as human resources, sales, spares and servicing departments and organises it into meaningful categories. These might include:

· Manager
· Employee
· Date/time
· Plant
· Product
· Customer
· Region

These categories can further be organised into hierarchies, For example Employees within Manager, Manager within Plant, Plant within Region and so on. This hierarchy could be described as a ‘Region’ dimension. With the data structured this way, we finally associate measures such as revenue, hours worked, quantity held to each level in each dimension.

This data structure is ideally suited to OLAP reporting, which allows you to quickly answer questions such as

“How many hours did employee A (who worked for manager B) work in January 2007?”

“How much stock of product C is currently held at plant D?”

Of course, OLAP reporting is only one way of analysing your data once it is held in a data warehouse. Solutions such as pre-written and ad-hoc reports, metric presentations (known as scorecards) and performance dashboards are also available through a comprehensive Business Intelligence system such as Cognos 8 BI.