A distributed OLAP-based method and system for generating association rules. An architecture is provided for processing transaction data to generate summary information, customer profiles, and association rules. The distributed system includes at least two layers of data warehouse/OLAP stations: local data-warehouse OLAP stations (LDOSs) and a global data-warehouse OLAP station (GDOS). The LDOSs perform local data mining and summarization, and the GDOS merges, mines, and summarizes the input data received from LDOSs. The summarized data is then utilized by the GDOS to generate association rules that can be provided to the LDOSs for business planning.