Data-Warehouse als Applikationsbasis? — Zur Kosten- und Leistungsrechnung (nicht nur) im Gesundheits- und Sozialwesen

Abstract

Using the hospital as an example for service sectors with a heterogeneous application landscape, we put forward the hypothesis that it is not feasible to implement cost accounting applications inside operative systems such as ERP, as it is assumed by the conventional data warehousing approach. Rather, the data warehouse, with its extraction, validation and transformation tools, delivers the right platform, creating an application layer which acts on the data before it is being loaded into multidimensional cubes.The cost accounting application enriches the data in the data warehouse by imputing costs and profits to the various calculatory objects such as ledgers, cost centres and cost objects (products).Our hypothesis is further validated by the fact that typical data warehousing tools, e.g. tree structures, are ideal for defining the often complicated calculation metadata.