Data Warehousing: The 3M Experience

Abstract

Data warehouses are helping resolve a major problem that has plagued decision support applications over the years — a lack of good data. Top management at 3M realized that the company had to move from being product-centric to being customer savvy. In response, 3M built a terabyte data warehouse (global enterprise data warehouse) that provides thousands of 3M employees with real-time access to accurate, global, detailed information. The data warehouse underlies new Web-based customer services that are dynamically generated based on warehouse information. There are useful lessons that were learned at 3M during their years of developing the data warehouse.