An organization that prides itself on delivering high-quality products and services to its customers, Christian Financial Credit Union in Roseville, Michigan knew that in order to keep up with its own rapid growth trajectory, it needed to change the way it accessed the data and information that was quickly becoming the lifeblood of the company. And that meant replacing its legacy datamart system with a modern data warehouse.
“We simply outgrew it,” said Dave Maurer, Chief Information Officer, Christian Financial Credit Union, of the company’s legacy datamart approach. “As our company’s need grew, it just wasn’t able to grow with them. We needed a true data warehouse infrastructure.”
As it is for just about any organization intent on staying competitive in the modern business world – one in which customers are increasingly expectant of products and services tailored in real time to meet the individual needs – getting better access to customer data in order to drive faster, smarter and informed business decisions was critical to Christian Financial Credit Union.
“Our end goal is always to better serve our members, and that means making sure the right products are available and offered to members when and where they need it,” said Maurer.
Making that happen, according to Maurer, meant empowering those in the company with the right information.
“Good decision making is critical in our business,” he said. “Everyone in the organization, from the CEO, to back-office workers, to those working with our members, must make hundreds of decisions on a daily basis, so it’s important that relevant data is available to them when they need it. Our experience and research has shown that a well-designed data warehouse can help to provide necessary information to decision makers.”
And that’s what ultimately drove the company to Dell Software’s QuickStart Data Warehouse solution. As more and more customers are learning every day, QSDW makes it possible to quickly tap into the power of data and improve business intelligence with a powerful and cost-effective data warehousing solution.
Engineered as an analytics-in-a-box solution, Quickstart Data Warehouse is a complete offering that includes hardware, software and services. Not only is deployment of QSDW rapid and automated, but its production-ready, complete with a drag-and-drop data integration tool that helps with faster time to insight for customers.
“While we looked at many options for our data warehouse, including building our own, we chose Dell because we felt Quickstart Data Warehouse product provided the jump start we needed,” said Maurer. “Our small IT staff is able to leverage the years of experience and planning that Dell and Microsoft put into the product to get a solid data warehouse up and running in a relatively short time period.”
With guidance for startup, initial training and quarterly health check value-added services available to help ensure success, Quickstart Data Warehouse has proven to be an especially strong fit for mid-market organizations, where both financial and human resources are limited. In that sense, QSDW is shattering the perception that a sophisticated data warehouse is something only the largest organizations can afford and manage. Just ask the team at Christian Financial.
“We now have a solution that enables us to operate more efficiently as an organization,” said Maurer. “As a result, members are offered better products and services based on their individual situation.”
What about your organization? Have you benefit from better access to data and the ability to make smarter, more informed business decisions? If so, feel free to drop me a line and share your story at Steven_Phillips@dell.com.