Decision support at Lands' End—An evolution

A decision support system with over one billion rows of data has been developed at Lands' End using the IBM DATABASE 2™ (DB2®) relational database management system. This corporate database is a subset of an Information Warehouse framework and functions as both a decision support system server and an application enabler. The corporate database uses operational data gathered from order processing and customer mailing systems. Weekly processes reformat these real-time data for loading into the corporate database. This paper discusses some of the business requirements that guided the development of the corporate database, and also describes the database design process, tool selection, and implementation experiences.