Data marts and data warehouses are not BI/DSS systems per se, but are rather major core components of the BI/DSS infrastructure that drive business applications in revenue management, supply chain management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource management, and so forth.

Data marts and data warehouses effectively store and provide the critical business intelligence data for business units needed for decision support. In other words, they improve the productivity of corporate decision-makers through consolidation, conversion, transformation, and integration of operational data, and provision of a consistent view of an enterprise or department.