Barita thrives from LIME data-warehousing services

Data warehousing is a process that has transformed business decision-making across the world. Here in Jamaica, Barita Investments Limited has been using LIME's data-warehousing services for more than five years.

"We decided to get the service from LIME because we have had a long relationship with the company and their service was the best available and provides good value for money," says Barita's manager, Ian McNaughton.

The 31-year-old Barita Investments Limited, founded by Rita Humphries-Lewin, has the distinction of being the oldest stock-brokerage company in Jamaica. It requires reliability of access to and analysis of its database.

"We have been around for a long time, with much data to handle, and if there is a system breakdown such as our servers, we can get our information back up in relatively quick time," McNaughton says, as a major benefit of LIME's data-warehousing services.

As the main repository of an organisation's historical data - its corporate memory - data warehousing contains the raw material for management's decision support system. This system enables data analysts to perform complex queries and analysis such as data mining on the information without slowing down the operational systems.

Licensed by the Financial Services Commission, Barita is a member of the Jamaica Stock Exchange and a primary dealer and cambio dealer for the Bank of Jamaica.

McNaughton says, "Client information/data is valuable and must be available despite whatever issues we are having." Another benefit of the service is that Barita's regulators require data recovery and business continuity, and the LIME service provides that.

McNaughton says he would recommend LIME's service as a platform for data management, analysis and reporting and is particularly impressed with the security it offers to the company.

Any small or medium-size business can benefit from LIME's business solutions which make business more efficient and effective. Packages can be tailored to clients' specific needs.

Other benefits of a data warehouse are said to include:

Maintenance of a copy of information from the source transaction systems, providing the opportunity to:

✱ Congregate data from multiple sources into a single database so a single query engine can be used to present data.

✱ Maintain data history, even if the source transaction systems do not.

✱ Improve data quality by providing consistent codes and descriptions, flagging or even fixing bad data.

✱ Present the organisation's information consistently.

✱ Provide a single, common data model for all data of interest, regardless of the data's source.

✱ Restructure the data so that they make sense to the business users.

✱ Add value to operational business applications, notably customer relationship management systems.