Examples of Business Dimensions

Examples of Business Dimensions

The concept of business dimensions-is fundamental to the requirements definition for a data warehouse. Therefore, we want to look at some more examples of business dimensions in a few other cases. Figure 5-3 displays the business dimensions in four different cases.

Let us quickly look at each of these examples. For the supermarket chain, the measurements that are analyzed are the sales units. These are analyzed along four business dimensions. When you are looking for the hypercube, the sides of such cubes are time, Promotion, product, and store. If you are the Marketing Manager for the supermarket chain, you would want your sales broken down by product, at each store, in 'laic sequence, and in relation to the promotions that take place.

For the insurance company, the business dimensions are different and appropriate for that business. Here you would want to analyze the claims data by agent, individual claim, time, insured party, individual policy, and status of the claim. The example of the airlines company shows the dimensions for analysis of frequent flyer data. Here the business dimensions are Mile, customer, specific flight, fare class, airport, and frequent flyer status.

The example analyzing shipments for a manufacturing company show some other business dimensions. In this case, the business dimensions used for the analysis of shipments are the ones relevant to that business and the subject of the analysis. I tem you see the dimensions of lime, ship-to and ship-from locations, shipping mode, product, and any special deals. 

What we find from these examples is that the business dimensions are different and relevant to the industry and to the subject for analysis. We also find the time dimension to be a common dimension in all examples. Almost all business analyses arc performed over time.