APPLICATION: Montgomery Ward Data Warehouse Pilot -- Montgomery Ward, Chicago, constantly faces the issue of maintaining proper levels of inventory for advertised items. The Chicago-based department store chain organized a project team in March 1997 to develop reports that could project potential inventory problems and measure inventory performance once a promotion was completed.

By May, Montgomery Ward had signed agreements with Sunnyvale, Calif-based Prism Solutions Inc., a maker of warehouse tools, and SPR, a data warehouse consulting company, to implement a pilot project.

Morton Mease, director of information services and technology at Montgomery Ward, said the guiding project principles were: to develop a limited scope data model; to source data elements; to extract and load data using a repeatable process and; to establish an information architecture on which to build.

The Prism Warehouse Executive was used to generate programs that would extract and integrate data from multiple source environments. A major challenge was the complexity of both the source and target environments. The Montgomery Ward database is comprised of 43 relational tables residing in DB2 PE. According to Mease, the development staff using the tools had no detailed knowledge of the source systems from which data was to be extracted for the data warehouse.

The Prism iterations methodology was implemented, and the project was completed in October 1997. Management agreed that all objectives were met, and integrated data was made available for a decision support process.

- Deborah Melewski