Decision Support Systems are incredibly important for any company as it allows for up to date analysis of data making it run more efficiently and profitably. A decision Support system is required to "Support business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance."1
I work in sales for a company that uses a Point of Sale(POS) decision support system(DSS) named Oliver. The POS Oliver, compiles sales information for Regional Sales Directors, as well as other managers to analyze whether or not the sales strategy they are imposing is beneficial or not. With the help of Oliver, RSD's are able to make quick decisions on how to approach sales for the upcoming month and communicate to the store managers which promotions they should use for maximum profit.
The data that is inputted and processed by Oliver is collected from the registers at every store within the region. Oliver stores this information in a Data Warehouse where it is processed and analyzed. The benefits of having such a warehouse are "Maintain data history, even if the source transaction systems do not. Restructure the data so that it makes sense to the business users. Restructure the data so that it delivers excellent query performance, even for complex analytic queries, without impacting the operational systems."2 Sales information is not the only data Oliver collects, payroll, and customer information is also stored within the data warehouse. In order to ensure the proper persons are able to view the the newly processed information, the data warehouse is split into various Data Marts.
A Data mart specifically is "A data mart is the access layer of the data warehouse environment that is used to get data out to the users. The data mart is a subset of the data warehouse that is usually oriented to a specific business line or team"3 These marts allow RSDs to view sales information specific to them as well as other parts of the company such as payroll to be able to view the number of hours worked for each employee. This categorization of information makes the system more efficient because it allows RSDs to specifically look at sales information and not have to comb through all the other information the system collects.
If it was not for Oliver the RSDs would not be able to query the stored sales information to account for growth or determine which sales are best during a specific time of year allowing for the company to maintain profits year to year.
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