A retail data warehouse models a transaction. A logistics data warehouse has to model a load — which moves through multiple events (tender, accept, pickup, in-transit, delivery, POD) over hours to days, touches revenue and multiple cost pools (linehaul, fuel, driver pay, accessorials), passes through lanes with their own profitability profiles, and needs to be reportable at the load, lane, customer, division, and carrier level simultaneously. The dimensional patterns that work for retail don't work here. Event-based load fact tables with proper grain, slowly-changing dimensions for customers and rate agreements, conformed metrics across modes, and the time-alignment logic for telematics and event data — all are required, and all are commonly skipped in implementations that produce a warehouse the operations team can't use.
Logistics data warehousing done right starts with the dimensional model and the actual use cases, not the technology choice. Load event facts with proper grain. Lane and origin-destination dimensions. Slowly-changing dimensions for rate agreements and customer contracts. Conformed metrics that reconcile to the settlement run. Telematics event tables with time alignment. With this foundation, the warehouse serves analytics, BI, and ML for years. Without it, it gets bypassed within months.