Business Intelligence + Data Model Importance

We're building a system for my current customer that will give them some impressive business intelligence functionality. The market that our customer sells in to is fairly small and rather static, so as a result, our tools will allow them to have an almost complete view of their market. They'll be able to look at that data from a number of perspectives and ask the question of how to increase their market share any number of ways. Questions like, "In which sector of the market are we weakest?" will be answerable with a few clicks of a manager's mouse.

We had to think long and hard about the underlying data model, but once that was worked out, everything just fell in to place. There have been a couple of tradeoffs throughout the process, but what we have now is truly powerful.