1. Describe FAC as a company and the challenges it faced in 1990s.
Founded in 1883, the First American Corporation (FAC) is the financial services holding company headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1990s, FAC faced the financial hardship because of low profitability and its losses. In order to overcome this hardship, the FAC began to change its organization and operations to implement customer-oriented strategy which called Tailored Client Solutions(TCS). This strategy could be implemented with Data warehouse technology which called VISION. 2. Describe the FAC warehouse project.
In short, the FAC warehouse project can be described as a 4steps. First, Collect internal and external raw data from many data sources. Second, Examine this raw data validity and purify the data by data extraction and transformation to store data into Data warehouse. Third, Analyze these data which stored and shared by the data warehouse to get proper and valuable information by using applications and tools. Fourth, with these information, the company implement customer-oriented strategies which can meet customer needs and make profit. This project was implemented with the phased development approach with solid business goals to get the efficient and effective results. 3. Provide the technical details of the data warehouse system implemented at FAC
FAC’s data warehouse platform was the NCR 5150M. It run the Teradata Relational Data Base System with 5 SMP nodes. This platform provided 1.5TB of data storage to FAC. Data from many sources like VSAM, IMS which stored in this storage could be accessed by dependent data mart created in an Oracle relational DBMS and Cognos cubes. The analysts in the company can analyze the profitability with tools called PAR which can be run by ad-hoc SQL queries and predefined reports. These kinds of analyzed data could be the information to decision makers by using VIEW in DBMS or many other