Combined with the historical data, current sales data lets the company forecast sales of specific titles. HarperCollins will soon bring its general ledger data into DataTracker, adding actual profitability data to the mix. If it knows how one product is moving through the channel, it can get a feel for how other titles might move. Companies will pay a lot of money for that. Our data warehouse on a common, accessible platform ensures that everyone in the company is operating from the same set of data.
Decisions are consistent and trackable.
By Half HarperCollins's Microsoft-based data warehouse is showing benefits in any number of other areas. The first is speed. That means more questions get asked, more decisions get made, and more work gets done every day. Anderson says he was ribbed by colleagues when first considering SQL Server for his large data warehouse. It's a toy, they told us, unsuitable for data stores over 50 gigabytes.