Welcome to the second executive interview about the CPI Card Group case study for the Capstone course. This interview reflects the actual design requirements faced by CPI Card Group in 2015, to provide a context for the data warehouse design documents in module two. The design document simplify and modify the design requirements faced by CPI Card Group. In the first executive interview, I talked with Tyler Wilson, ERP Manager at CPI Card Group. In this interview, Tyler is joined by Skylar Gast, a business analyst, based in the Indiana office of the CPI Card Group. Skylar, please provide a brief summary of your background and experience at CPI Card Group. >> Sure. I have a computer science background, and I started out as a developer out of college, and I've been put in an analyst position throughout my career. I started at CPI Card Group a year ago, and really was put on the BI project, right as I started. So, I've been in through design and through the implementation of our data model and gathering requirements from our users. >> Thanks for sharing your background, Skylar. Tyler, tells us about the Business Intelligence Initiative at CPI Card Group. >> Yeah, so the project kicked off really at the beginning of 2015. Myself, my boss, the head of IT, and our chief accounting officer, Jerry Dreiling, were the ones driving the project. The first thing we did was engage the business users. And we decided that we wanted to lay a financial foundation to drive all of our metrics. So we began with all of our cost accountants and all of our controllers at each location. From there, that consisted of our project team, and we actually began to analyze different products in the market, and what we were looking for was really a full solution. Something that could take all of our data at the source, ETL the data, put it in a data warehouse, and then we could use the Business Intelligence tool for all of our analytics. We actually spent five months doing that, from January to May. Once we got into May, we actually began implementation of the product. And we actually had the product up and live in a shorter timeframe than we did our entire selection. We are now carrying the project out across all business units of our company. We actually were working earlier today on some operational metrics with our operational team here in Colorado. >> I'm going to turn to Tyler's colleague at CPI Card Group, Skylar Gast, to talk about the architecture in data sources used in a Business Intelligence Initiative. >> Sure. So we have a few data sources that we want to connect to in phase one. Our main one is our ERP system, Monarch. It has a SQL Server database. We have Hyperion, which carries all of our financial reporting information, which is also a SQL Server database. And then we have another accounting system that one of our acquisitions uses, called Sage. And a flat file to consume our leads that we talked about earlier. So, probably our most complex system is Monarch, which is our ERP system. We were first focused on financials, so we wanted to pull in invoices, we wanted to pull in GL accounts, information like that, so we can build analyses off of them. The SQL Server database is pretty complicated because of the way that it was built. Monarch was originally built in progress, and then the SQL Server database was an afterthought. So, it was taking these progress tables and converting them to SQL Server. So it lacks referential integrity, it lacks a lot of the relational database qualities that you would see in modern applications. So we didn't want to use a one-to-one relationship from Monarch to our data model because it just, it would not be a good way to build analytics off of. So that's where we spend a lot of time is designing a way to transform the data from the Monarch SQL Server database into our data warehouse, and making a couple facts off of that information. >> Okay, Skylar, can you elaborate on the business reporting needs, just kind of driving the development of the data warehouse and the Business Intelligence Solution. >> Sure. So, I'll just start where we are today. So, what we were doing this week, actually, is meeting with our operation's users. Managers and supervisors that are at the plant and making sure that jobs go through the plant successfully and on time. So we're looking at how our card is formed from a sheet of plastic, putting colors and ink on it, getting laminated, all the way to getting a stamp on it and a chip, and out the door to the customer. So what we learned this week is that backlog, which is going to be jobs that have a value, that are billable to our customer, but we just haven't quite gotten to them yet. That's really something that's driving our business from financials, all the way down to scheduling our jobs on the floor and when they're going to hit different work centers in our plant and really driving to hit those on time delivery dates. >> Thanks Skylar and Tyler, for sharing your experiences with the Business Intelligence Initiative at CPI Card Group. Let me conclude this interview with some comments about the documents and assignment in module two. The documents in module two provide the requirements for the data warehouse design, data sources, simple data, and business needs. As you read your requirements documents, you should think about the differences between the data warehouse requirements in the case study and the requirements you learned about in this interview. The requirements to the assignment in module two are similar to the requirements in the module three assignment in course two. You need to define dimensional models, specify the grain of each data cube, convert data cubes into relational database design using schema patterns, identify summarized building problems and preferred resolutions, and populate warehouse tables with sample data. Because of the size of the complete solution, your design only needs to include a subset of the complete design.
