A business analyst describes his information needs and business process as, Track the performance of

materials with respect to customers and sales persons The following nouns relate to the business
analysts information needs: Material Customer Sales Person The nouns are basic business objects
and are usually called Strong Entities (see figure 3):

Customer Material Sales Person

(figure 3) Ask the business analyst about the relationship between his basic business terms (strong
entities). Normally the relationship between strong entities are N:M Relationships i.e. a customer can
purchase multiple materials and materials can be purchased by multiple customers (see figure 4):

Customer Material Sales Person

(figure 4) Ask the business analyst how performance is measured. This will give you the basic Facts.
Facts are normally additive and describe n:m relationships. In a business scenario with a working
document this document forms an Intersection Entity which often resolves the n:m relationships to 1:n
relationships. In the first instance, however, it is up to the business analyst whether or not to include the
working document in the model when analysing a sales transaction (see figure 5):

Customer

Sales Transaction

Material

Material group

Sales Person

Sales Department

Intersection Entity

(figure 5)

Multi-Dimensional Modeling with BI

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In the next stage, ask the business analyst to be more precise and determine additional details for
material, customer and sales person. This gives you additional entities and attributes, where attributes
are the describing fields of an entity. In ERM diagrams attributes show the fields in relational tables.
The attributes demonstrate to what extent it is possible to store data concerning this entity (see figure
6).