Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management - Case Study Example

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Assignment 2 The daily trade to import or export a production is known to be a business. On the globe around there are numberof daily usage products that are manufactured and produce for the sale. Certainly, sale is not easy and though there are number of ways to manage it. Teens_R_Us is also a business managing company that takes a large amount of clothing from different qualified suppliers and sale them in big stores with their company label on them. This specialized apparel sale company is a big retailer of Australia and this took almost 7 years to make their position in the worldwide scope. They did their best for their business to be competitive among market. However, they are running their business on website and have other small databases handling small different departments of organizations; moreover, giving best at their marketing department but though that is not enough to compete business in this technical world of computers. In other words, IT world has change the way to trade; the way of in-house management and the way to sale their production. The CEO, Mr. Peter Rada of Teen_R_Us concede this when he attended industry conference where business intelligence was discussed. He was keen to implement Business Intelligent solution for his business consisting of a web analytics, the data ware house, an OLAP system and data mining capabilities. A companied with Mr. Ben Etton, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company and Mr. Jean Price, the senior accountant of the company worked out on this new technical change for the company and ask for different proposals explaining business system with its components in detail and their specific implementations. They set their budget that affords a system in every two years and though wants the priority implementations of the whole system in ten years. Business Intelligence is a collective word, which describes a deep analysis on the trade made for last few years. This is a system, which shows up with concepts and methods to improve business. In other words, business intelligence is the name of analysis made upon the past information of the organization along with providing data management of the organization using different latest tools and technologies. It more over allows the business users and other management to keep the records of all critical activities took place in form of data mining carrying in a collective data called data ware house. This business intelligence system provides reports in a style that are practically used by senior managers, leads and other members of team. These reports help the business royals to take actions in positive successive way towards their organization. Though making decisions on information provided by the organization doesn't covers the whole business; as business is the name of management of production and it's trading. Data Mining may allow analyzing for the futuristic step taken for the company's growth; data warehouse might keep the records of all trades but more important to all this is to make the production in demand. To satisfy the customers by giving the best in services. To make more and more customers by providing them with products they need in a comfortable price range. This all is about marketing which may be performed by web analytics; i.e., providing the trade online to its customers in a form of website. More parleying about business information is that it's a process to enhance business in a competitive means giving advantage to business by using the available data for decision-making. Major five steps for business intelligence are as follows: Data Sources Data Analysis Situation Awareness Risk Assessment Decision Support Data Sources: Business intelligence system needs data extraction and that can be done from report, emails, memos, documents, images, sounds, formatted texts, web pages and other list. The data is sourced electronically so that it can further used by the business intelligence system installed on an electronic machine like computer. Though, data can be sourced from scanners, digital cameras, web pages, data base queries or web searches etc. This all data collection is saved in a data warehouse, which is later used for selecting data for particular context. Data Analysis: Business intelligence process is about using useful knowledge from data and information by the business. Estimation of present trends, prediction of missing information and future trends, validating different strategies, collecting and summarizing disperse information etc. are all different courses of data analysis. It can be performed by probability theory, statistical methods, operational researches or artificial intelligence, which is commonly used. This analysis is also called Data Mining. Situation Awareness: Business intelligence system requires filtration of unwanted information to store and work more on the required information. Algorithms are designed to grasp the special information and their situation for future decision-makings. It is mostly enabled in web sites and counted as web analytics that allow logging user steps and reasons for choosing or rejecting the product. Risk Assessment: This is an intelligent system, which predicts the dangers in business, which may rise on taking some particular decisions. Though business intelligence system in itself feed algorithms that allow predicting the downfall of business analyzing the present market status and competitors. It may also be analyzed from the web logs maintained while marketing the product. Decision Support: An intelligence system may help the business users by alerting them to take different steps on different particular events. For example, it may suggest you to buy shares for the benefit of business when market of a particular business in going in good wealth. It is found in business intelligence system as it helps the traders to improve sales and achieve customer satisfaction. Teens_R_US, clothing company requires a business intelligence that is consists of web analytics and other few defined features. However, Teens_R_Us needs a system that manages data in a flexible manner for the increase in managing controls on data and enables informative and reasonable decisions for business enhancements, at every level of business organization. The company currently using standard relational databases using SQL. Benefits of the new system will be Enhanced analytics, better view of the business, enterprise-level grade solution and Easier database management system will help in all levels of business improvement and will help in taking decisions for long term. Business Intelligence solution will help the company to collect relevant business information, automate the assimilation of the information into intelligence and provide analysis tools for making intelligent comparisons in minimum time period and results positively by showing better understanding of company's customers buying patterns and assisting them in identifying sales and profit growth opportunities. Though Teens_R_Us is already running an online web site where the products are being sold, but there is no such web analytical service by which they can study the behavior of website visitors and maintains their activity logs. Business Intelligence needs to have an implementation of Web analytics technology by which company can make itself able to view web activity of clients. It may also include web traffic reports, email response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information of Teens_R_Us sales. The new Web analytics system has given business analysts the ability to create their own data reports and perform live web data analysis. Web analytics system will help in marketing decisions and the status of online clients so that CEO of Teens_R_Us, Mr. Peter can easily check the usage of the web site traffic of online clients. Business Intelligence that is being developed for this company requires having a data warehouse where company can maintain all company information and particular data in one place. Data warehouse enhances end-user access to a wide variety of data. Stakeholder of business may obtain specified trend reports, e.g. the item with the most sales in a particular area within the last years and other critical searches. Company Teens_R_Us requires a functionality known as data mining which helps in analyzing data with the capability of discovering a hidden information from the huge data warehouse to take business alerts and other help like decision makings and report writings etc. for the business enrichment. After implementing online analytical processing, OLAP is computer processing that will enables Teens_R_Us to easily and selectively extract and view data from different points-of-view. For example, Teens_R_Us user can request that data be analyzed to display a spreadsheet showing all of a company's products sold in Australian clothing industry in the last year, compare revenue figures with those for the same products in current year, and then see a comparison of other product sales in Australian clothing industry in the same time period. To facilitate this kind of analysis, OLAP data is stored in a multidimensional database. Whereas a relational database can be thought of as two-dimensional, a multidimensional database considers each data attribute (such as product, geographic sales region, and time period) as a separate "dimension." OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing. OLAP can be used for data mining or the discovery of previously undiscounted relationships between data items. An OLAP database does not need to be as large as a data warehouse, since not all transactional data is needed for trend analysis. Using Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), data can be imported from existing relational databases to create a multidimensional database for OLAP. The new system enables and supports major marketing and business initiatives such as customer segmentation and profiling, tariff analysis, customer maintenance, and campaign management. The main advantage of implementing OLAP can be used for data mining or the discovery of previously lost relationships between data items. An OLAP database does not need to be as large as a data warehouse, since not all transactional data is needed for trend analysis. Using Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), data can be imported from existing relational databases to create a multidimensional database for OLAP. However, Teens_R_Us is filled with small databases but combining all small databases a large data warehouse is require. As Client's mission is to achieve success in sale though a website carrying a perfect shopping cart with all capabilities of logging each client should be maintained. This would be the first deliverable for the business intelligence system. This and every other module should be developed in a manner that other modules develop later may connect them without giving any trouble shooting which may damage the business. Then these web analytical techniques should be imposed following with data warehouse setup and then OLAP techniques. Lastly it should emerge the data mining techniques that may result the business with different risk taking and business improvement alerts and helping it with different reporting and decision-making suggestions. REFERENCES Anonymous (n.d.) Data Warehouse Glossary. Information Technology Anonymous (n.d.) Oracle Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management. Connecting the Dots. Oracle Anonymous (2006) OLAP. Intelligent Solutions Empowering Your Enterprise. Paris Technologies Luca Rossetti (November 21, 2007) Business Intelligence. Search DataManagement.com Definitions Microsoft Corporation (September 30, 2007) Case study: Mobitel-Wireless Telecommunications Operator Builds a Business Intelligence system. Microsoft: Microsoft Case Studies. Read More