Data warehousing is the best solution to relieve the database management systems from holding the long-standing data which accumulates from day-to-day business transactions. But creating and managing a data warehouse is a complex task, and in addition, data warehouse tools available in the market are very expensive. To make the data warehouse solutions cost-effective, creation of virtual data warehouse is one of the options in the case of applications having limited scope or limited duration. This paper deals with the development of such virtual data warehouse for effective supply chain management for a multinational software development and consultancy company dealing with big semiconductor manufacturing industries. The design and development of the virtual data warehouse is described in detail using the existing database management systems and the existing huge database of the companies. The data warehouse has been created based on the important business requirements, identifying the relevant existing data sources that can be integrated to generate respective dimensional tables and, thereby, the fact tables, and then finally completing the multidimensional models to derive answers to the respective queries. The paper also presents some screen shots of the application interface.

When the regular business transactional data accumulates, the storage space of the operating database will gradually get exhausted and the columnar processing of data within the tables that are related to a business query will take a long time and sometimes result in errors. Data warehouse is the best solution to keep the historical data at one end and organize that data for proper processing to meet the information needs of the business at the other end. Data warehousing is a process of extracting data from different data sources, transforming and aggregating that data, and accessing integrated data in an efficient and flexible manner so as to generate answers to different queries put forth. Levin (1996) points out some examples of the objectives of data warehouse, viz., supporting strategic decision making and integrated business value chain, speeding up response time to business queries, and data quality.

A data warehouse is a powerful database model that significantly enhances the user's ability to quickly analyze large and multidimensional data sets (Mohanty, 2006). According to Mattison (1996), a data warehouse is like a database that is organized to serve as a neutral data storage area; is used by data mining and other applications; meets a specific set of business requirements; and uses data that meet a predefined set of business criteria. Every data warehouse has a structure and methodology that performs an extensive transformation of the data, and over a period of time the data warehouse can grow into a powerful corporate decision support asset (Catherineet al., 2000). Even though a data warehouse is similar to a database, it differs from the database system in the case of modeling because of its higher integration utility. More normalization of data is favored in database management system, whereas less normalization in data warehousing system.

Operations Management Journal, Virtual Data Warehouse, Manufacturing Industry, Database Management Systems, Data Warehousing, Multinational Software Development, Business Transactional Data, Business Queries, Data Mining, Organizational Information System, Semiconductor Manufacturing Organizations, Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP, Supply Chain Management, SCM, Business Development.