What are the benefits of data warehousing?

Data warehouses are designed to perform well with aggregate queries running on large amounts of data. The structure of data warehouses is easier for end users to navigate, understand and query against unlike the relational databases primarily designed to handle lots of transactions. Data warehouses enable queries that cut across different segments of a company's operation. E.g. production data could be compared against inventory data even if they were originally stored in different databases with different structures.