Zero Latency applied on a commercial Data Mart: Real-time information in support of decision making

The growing development of technology, which has been experienced for several decades, caused the area of Information Technology (IT) to have a significant advance in the corporate world. The expansion of IT to different areas of the company has enabled a greater transmission and storage of information. The arrival of personal computers has also been a greater contributor to an increase in storage of information. Due to that, databases and Information Systems where deployed. The managers began to use the databases for specific business areas, which are called Data Marts (DM). Despite the use of Data Marts, the extracted scenarios did not express the updated information in the way management would require, because there was still a time lag between the occurrence of an event and its absorption by the company, which in fact, meant a delay in moving forward with essential and strategic areas of the business. Minimize this lag became a challenge and a necessity for the competitive business world. At the time, the solution adopted, in order to minimize the time lag between the occurrences and the effective absorption of this information, was called Zero Latency Enterprise (ZLE). The aim of this paper is to examine how real time information can be obtained through the implementation of a ZLE in the DM and how, effectively, it would support the strategic decision-making process in organizations. In order to achieve that, a proposal has been put forward to create a model of DM in ZLE with data obtained from the commercial department of a civil engineering supply company. This analysis reveals significant results, supporting the original idea to develop support for decision making.