Effectiveness of OLAP-Based Sales Analysis in Retail Enterprises

Data warehouse and online analytical processing (OLAP) are two significant information technology (IT) strategies. To commercial enterprises, merchandise sales play important and special role. With the market competition getting fierce, managers see information as a critical resource and require methods that let them exploit it for competitive advantage. The development of data warehouse and OLAP make it possible to use these technologies to help managers´ analysis and decision making. In this study, we take the case of a drugs retail enterprise, propose a drugs sales data cube and attempt to apply it to drugs sales data OLAP analysis. We give an OLAP structure based on Web. This paper provides the method to realize OLAP data analysis from Web pages through bedding office Web components, and realizes the OLAP multidimensional data analyses.