Yes. Our Data Model supports up to 5 financial budgets in any given year. We have utilities available to load budgets to our Financial API which in-turn sends them to the Financial Data Mart. Many clients use an Excel front-end for budget entry. Using the Cognos/Excel add-in, you can provide managers with last-year's actuals to aid in creating this year's plan. Another option would be to provide a custom front end for users to enter budgets. CornerStar consultants have the expertise to help with this, including creating a browser based front-end for use over the company’s intranet.

Data Warehouse reduces reporting errors. Data Warehouse enforces a level of discipline that encourages clean and consistent data. Hours of analysis into the way your company does business occurs every time you write even the simplest report directly against your source system. Multiply this by the number of users and reports generated, and you may find that you are pulling the same information several times, sometimes incorrectly and often inconsistently. With a Data Warehouse the difficult analysis has been funneled through the transformation process. Report writing becomes easier and less time-consuming.

Data Warehouse is designed for reporting. Most OLTP systems are designed for very specific business functions like creating sales orders or releasing batches of work orders—not for reporting.

A Data Warehouse, on the other hand, is designed specifically for business users to retrieve and analyze large sets of records quickly and easily. The CornerStar model uses descriptive field names like “sold_to_region”. In other words, language that is meaningful and relevant to the user. In addition, CornerStar provides detail data as well as several levels of summarization and pre-calculated values. This makes it easy for non-technical personnel to perform their own ad-hoc queries without the need to create cross-tab reports.

Data Warehouse can consolidate data from multiple source systems. This is a difficult task with most reporting tools. The CornerStar Data Warehouse is designed to consolidate multiple databases into one place to provide a foundation for worldwide reporting.

Data Warehouse can capture historical data that would otherwise be “lost” from your source system. Master file data such as the ship-to address, or customer type can change in your source system and sometimes is not retained in historical files. A CornerStar Data Warehouse provides views to your data using both the current and historical attributes. Also, snapshot type data like sales order backlog or open purchase orders can be captured and trended by our Data Warehouse.