In Decentralized Warehouse, a central gateway provides access to remote data with the help of a logical view.  This central gateway processes real time user queries. Users can access and also query the remote data via central gateway.

A data warehouse is very large repository of a company’s historical and current transactional data. In order for the data warehouse to efficiently handle the high volume data while trying to service potentially high number of data consumer, certain mechanisms must be considered in the design and implementation of a data warehouse in order to smoothly operate the whole system.

One of the techniques in data warehousing is having a decentralized warehouse. As one of the major current trends in business is gaining market power through mergers and acquisitions and through selling off some business units that a large company thinks are no longer efficient or represent core competencies, many business set-ups need to considered in data warehousing designs.

In the case of mergers and selling of business units, many large business organizations often end up in restructuring of activities and data considerations that can be given benefit to by implementing a decentralized warehouse.

A decentralized data warehouse separates data management but many key areas of the business enterprise. For instance, a warehouse management system can be a stand alone decentralized system or can be operated with a centrally operated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

A really large business enterprise may have the following implementation: Goods Movement in the Decentralized Warehouse; Goods Receipt in a Decentralized Warehouse; Goods Issue in a Decentralized Warehouse; Stock Transfers in a Decentralized Warehouse; Posting Changes in a Decentralized Warehouse. These are just a few of the example of an enterprise data warehousing schema but in real life scenario, there could be a lot more areas that need decentralized data warehouse.

In order to these decentralized data warehouses to work together in order to collaborate with the business intelligence system and therefore give valuable information to enterprise data consumers, there has to be an integration mechanism. The integration can be done by a Decentralized Warehouse Management System.

A Decentralized Warehouse Management System usually works by defining the warehouse numbers, assigning warehouse numbers to the combination of plants and storage locations, activating the warehouse management system, defining and activating the interface, defining output types, defining the logical systems for the decentralized warehouse, generating distribution model, generating partner profile and defining the transmission model within the data warehouse.

Decentralizing a warehouse can be more efficient than having one monolithic structure in that each of the decentralized databases is being controlled by a specific department. This means that data consumers trying to access specific data will not have to wait for a single system to scan through very large bulks of data and wait for a long time before getting the desired information.

One of the main considerations with implementing a decentralized warehouse is that the network infrastructure. Since data will be coming from different data warehouse, it means that huge bulks of data may be shared at regular intervals and this can even increase when there are move data consumers using at the same time. The network should be able to able to handle traffic management efficiently.

Many commercial decentralized warehouse management software applications are available in the market today. Most of these software applications are classified under business solutions and its goes under the same category as enterprise resource planning. Investing in business solutions may be initially expensive but the return in investment will definitely be worthwhile.