The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling

Chapter 5. Order Management

Order management consists of several critical business processes, including order, shipment, and invoice processing. These processes spawn important business metrics, such as sales volume and invoice revenue, that are key performance indicators for any organization that sells products or services to others. In fact, these foundation metrics are so crucial that data warehouse teams most frequently tackle one of the order management processes for their initial data warehouse implementation. Clearly, the topics in this case study transcend industry boundaries.

In this chapter we'll explore several different order management transactions, including the common characteristics and complications you might encounter when dimensionally modeling these transactions. We'll elaborate on the concept of an accumulating snapshot to analyze the order-fulfillment pipeline from initial order through release to manufacturing, into finished goods inventory, and finally to product shipment and invoicing. We'll close the chapter by comparing and contrasting the three types of fact tables: transaction, periodic snapshot, and accumulating snapshot. For each of these fact table types, we'll also discuss the handling of real-time warehousing requirements.

Note

Chapter 5 discusses the following concepts:

• Orders transaction schema

• Fact table normalization considerations

• Date dimension role-playing

• More on product dimensions

• Ship-to / bill-to customer dimension considerations

• Junk dimensions ...