From Overwhelmed to Empowered: How Data Marts Deliver Clarity Inside a Data Factory

Picture this: Your CEO walks into the office on a Monday morning with a simple question: “Which contracts were the least profitable last week?” 

You know your workforce management software has your contract history data – but getting a specific answer means navigating through multiple reports and cross-referencing data points.

Sound familiar? If your team is spending more time hunting for data than actually using it, you’re not alone. Commercial cleaning and security companies are all facing the same challenge: they have more data than they know what to do with, but somehow they struggle to get answers to simple questions. What makes this even more complicated is that the nuance of a data search can change depending on who, exactly, is asking the question.

This is exactly the problem data marts solve and why they’re becoming essential for service companies that want to unlock the full analytical potential of the operational data they’re already collecting. 

What Is a Data Mart? (The Simple Answer) 

A data mart is a subset of a data warehouse that’s designed for a specific business function, department or user group – sales, operations, finance, etc. It contains curated, relevant data tailored to that team’s needs, making it faster and easier for them to access insights without sifting through unrelated information. 

Data Mart vs. Data Warehouse: What’s the Difference?

A data mart exists within a data warehouse to better meet the needs of smaller divisions of your company, without creating data siloes.

A data mart works in three steps. 

1. Data Collection: Information gets pulled from your main data warehouse, like a slice of the cake
2. Filtering and Organization: It’s stored and structured for specific teams and their workflows
3. Focused Access: Teams access only what they need through targeted dashboards and reports and with full security access controls

Because each data mart is being fed by the main data warehouse, it prevents scattered and inaccurate data. Individuals are still referring to the same data truth, just without all of the extra noise.

Another way to think of it is like this: Your data warehouse is a library, where everything your company has ever tracked gets organized and stored. A data mart is a reading room in that giant library, filled with only the books your team needs. 

In context of a service company company, different data marts can have different use cases: 

• An employee performance data mart (with KPIs like completion rates, absence records, average job time)
• A retention data mart (focused on customer retention, employee retention) 
• A customer service data mart (tracking response times, satisfaction scores, ticket resolution)

Each of these serves a distinct purpose and audience, but they all pull from the same underlying data warehouse.

The Problem: When Analytics Tools Overwhelm Instead of Help

Without a data mart structure, users may log into analytics tools only to find a never-ending dump of raw, unfiltered data. It’s difficult to find what’s relevant, which can lead to frustration, poor adoption and even data paralysis. 

Matters can get even more complicated for companies with multiple branches who deal with fragmented data spread across systems, locations and formats. 

The Real-World Role of a Data mart

A data mart acts like a sort of concierge. Instead of giving you an entire warehouse, it provides a section curated for your needs. Whether you’re in operations, marketing, finance or the C-suite, your views become streamlined and pre-filtered for what matters most to your role. 

A perfect example of this concept comes from Insight Pest Canada. Their national manager, Matteo Stradiotto, described the operational chaos that many companies face:

“To get a technician started on the road, we have to get them set up with lots of different accounts. They might have different names across various systems – someone might go by their middle name in messaging apps but use their legal name in payroll, for example. There’s a chaos there that we want to move away from: those hundreds of tiny data-entry tasks that saturate our branch managers’ mental bandwidth need to be automated away.” 

This is a perfect analogy for what a data mart can solve. Instead of your team being inundated with the chaos of your entire data warehouse, a data mart helps break everything down into understandable, usable information. It eliminates the chaos. Different personas receive exactly what they need without the burden of managing data across scattered systems. 

Why Data Marts Lead to Faster Analytics

Faster Time to Insight

No need to dig through irrelevant data — users get direct access to what matters. Teams work from a single source of truth tailored to their domain.

Better Decisions

When the right information is immediately available, managers make proactive decisions instead of reactive ones. Problems get spotted before they become customer complaints.

Higher User Adoption of Analytics Tools Across Teams

When analytics tools show relevant information from the start, employees actually use them. Training decreases, daily usage increases and ROI improves.

Less Burden on IT and Data Teams

Business users can explore data without needing custom reports or deep technical help. IT teams focus on maintaining the infrastructure instead of building one-off reports.

Improved Cross-Functional Alignment

While each team has their specialized view, data marts can share common metrics across departments. Sales and operations can both track customer satisfaction, but see it through their respective operational lenses.

Improved Security

Access can be limited to only the necessary data for each group, ensuring teams see only what they need for their specific functions.

How WorkWave’s Data Factory Enables Data Marts

Wavelytics’ Data Factory provides an all-in-one solution to streamline data management with a scalable, ready-to-use platform. Through Snowflake’s secure data share, live data can be seamlessly accessed to build comprehensive analytics with your own BI tools and integrated into other data sources.

Key features that make data marts work:

• Embedded Logic: Built-in analytics logic means no time spent building and testing from scratch — get straight to actionable insights
• Near Real-Time Processing: Benefit from near real-time data processing, enabling faster, data-driven decision-making
• Transparency: Our solution is fully documented with exposed logic to avoid the “black box” effect, giving you complete visibility and control over your data processes
• History Tracking: Our solution tracks changes to data so historical lookback is seamless and available for reporting or analytics

Key advantages:

• Accelerated Time to Market: Pre-built solutions reduce deployment time and development time
• Continuous Maintenance: Get ongoing maintenance updates driven by customer needs
• Built With Industry Best Practices: We ensure optimal performance, data security and privacy compliance
• Reduced Engineering Costs: Minimizes the need for substantial in-house engineering resources

Why Industry Focus Matters for Data Marts

Here’s the thing most companies get wrong about data marts: they try to build generic solutions that work for “any business.” But pest control companies don’t track the same metrics as law firms. Lawn care operations have completely different seasonal patterns than retail stores.

That’s why working with a data warehousing provider that actually understands your industry makes all the difference. When someone knows the unique ways service companies use data from the beginning, they can build data marts that actually fit how your teams work.

This is exactly how WorkWave developed Data Factory — through an early adopter program where representatives from pest control, lawn care, cleaning and security companies worked directly with the development team.

As Matteo Stradiotto from Insight Pest Canada explains: “We’ve been meeting regularly with the people who actually have their hands in the code. We have a lot of core people involved in these conversations and the active development of the solution. It’s exciting, because it really does mean that this will be something unique created to meet the needs of our industry and our company.”

From Overwhelmed to Empowered: The Strategic Advantage

Companies that implement well-designed data marts gain a significant competitive advantage. Their managers make better decisions faster. Their teams leverage analytics tools. Their operations become more efficient while competitors struggle with spreadsheets and monthly reports.

As WorkWave CEO Kevin Kemmerer puts it: “What gets measured gets improved, so when your company is data-driven, you’re going to be able to run a more profitable business with stronger revenue growth.”

Data marts empower teams to make better decisions faster. When your operations manager can check performance metrics in seconds, when your finance team can analyze profitability without waiting for custom reports, and when your customer service team can spot trends immediately, you’re creating an ecosystem where everyone in your company has the knowledge, access, and understanding needed to make your business better.