In the last five to seven years, there’s been a quiet revolution in the affordability of data warehousing tools. Complex systems that had six figure price tags and fiddly on-premise hardware are now available in the cloud – and they’re one or two orders of magnitude cheaper. Amazon led this revolution with their RedShift database offering, but other competitors (most notably Snowflake) are also offering relatively inexpensive cloud databases capable of querying millions of rows of data in seconds.
For GPOs in the food service vertical, these systems can power almost instantaneous analysis of member data. Unfortunately, these systems won’t slurp up data and spit out intelligence without some work. GPOTechnology offers a set of services to let GPOs take advantage of the the data warehousing revolution:
- Data Modeling. Modern “columnar” data warehousing tools run much faster when the data is organized to exploit the power of the database engine. GPOTechnology will analyze your purchase data and create optimized data models for use in the database engine that makes sense for your data.
- Data Transformation. Member data in the food vertical is often messy. Data must be cleaned and transformed before it can be loaded in the data model. We can create scripts and other scheduled processes to load new data into your warehouse.
- Analytics Integration. Analysis tools define their own data model – often called a “cube” – which also needs configuration. GPOTechnology will pair your analytical tool with your data warehouse and build the cubes you need for instant analysis.
Data warehousing is another area where it’s possible to spend a lot of money with little result. GPOTechnology can serve as your guide to make sure your data warehousing investment will be an effective tool for understanding the spending patterns of your membership.