Business Intelligence and enterprise data mining management
Business intelligence is one of the techniques of analyzing business process data in the enterprise and mainly comprises the practice of capturing and assessing various aspects of customers, competitors and the enterprise as a whole. BI is used in gathering, storing, analyzing and providing access to intelligent information used to derive trends, patterns of business and decision-making processes. Enterprises can make more accurate information concerning tactical and strategic plans such as determining supply chain or competing in a specific market.
This paper concerns an implementation plan for building up BI and EMD capabilities in Woolworth. The paper will discuss user groups given access to BI and DM, BI and DM tools, and technologies to be deployed, internal and external data to be utilized in BI and DM process. It is based on business opportunities and threats, training and system support requirements and budgetary concerns.
IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
Information technology revolution has generated numerous amounts or raw data. The amount of data is growing exponentially due to the explosion of connected devices, internet services, social media, sensors and cameras, social media and user-generated content. The amount of data derived from business processes in many organizations exceeds that of US Library of Congress. It is according to the McKinsey Global Institute. An example of such businesses is Wal-Mart. The retail giant handles more than 1 million transactions per hour importing this data to databases estimated to have 2.5 petabytes. This data is equivalent to 167 times information contained in all books in Library of Congress. The business community is well aware of this data overload and information from business source. Analysis indicate that 61% of managers belief that information overload is at their workstations, 80% believe that explosion will continue exponentially, 50% of managers ignore data in their decision making processes because of overload, and finally, 84% of managers do not use the information for current analysis but store it for future use. It is trends like this that ignite the need to analyze data in organizations to derive useful insights.
Woolworth seeks to implement an enterprise data warehouse platform to improve its efficiency and get more insight into its operations in stores. The aim of the project is to improve data visibility by providing a single view of critical business information.
Woolworth’s management appreciates the fact that enhancing operational efficiency is key to its sustainability in a competitive market. Improving insight into the store operation is essential to take customer service experiences to the next level which may consequently derive more sales, revenue and profits. It is apparent that customer experience will make a huge impact to the company’s success in the future. If Woolworth has to develop sustainably, it must secure and safeguard its customer base by studying current trends in customer experience and satisfaction and respond proactively.
Woolworth will seek a business intelligence service solution as well as a data integration partner, data analytics and reporting platform. These are the technical aspect of the implementation process. Since implementation plans should not only consider technical aspects, an implementation plan that satisfies the following demands is drafted.
- Business priorities and expected benefits
- Target users or groups
- BI options to meet the demands of the users
- Those to deliver the BI
- BI cost considerations compared to savings and other benefits
- BI implementation approach
Woolworth may run into risks of making critical decisions based on insufficient and inaccurate information. Making decisions based on the incorrect information is detrimental to the company. In order to study its customer behavior and tailor services to fit their demands, an analytic and business intelligence is mandatory. BI when well-conceived and property deployed will allow Woolworth users to make critical, informed choices and decisions at every single instance and time. The specific business priorities and anticipated benefits derived from the implementation include:
It is the most tangible aspect of BI in that Woolworth will save a considerable amount of time and resources that could be used for manually creating standards reports. BI reduces the labor cost and time by computerizing data collection and summation, computerizing reports. There is establishing report mechanisms that facilitate programming of reporting features and finally reduces training required to produce and maintain reports.
The second benefit is the reduction of information bottlenecks. End users in Woolworth will extract reports when required instead of depending on computer savvy personnel in IT departments. Information bottleneck is greatly reduced by because the BI utilization will provide customized, function-based dashboards that obtain the most essential data on a daily basis. Other additional benefits include the ability to launch reports autonomously, documentation of KPI analysis and validation of data without the input of IT specialists.
It is a common concern ion many organizations including Woolworth that data is not always actionable. For instance, employees use extensive amount of time and resources compiling standard reports and passing it to relevant personnel. In the long run, employees are overwhelmed, and a clear picture of the overall situation is missed given that data get at the intended employee weeks or days after. For instance, reading and understanding an unsatisfied customer based on their reviews and feedback may take a while before it reaches relevant personnel. When it finally reaches, its value and relevance may have decreased significantly meaning some business value has been lost. Also, reading the head and tail of the data becomes ands issue because employees do not necessarily posses the training and knowledge to interpret the numbers and derive insight. With BI implementation in Woolworth, information will be made actionable by displaying information via cohesive forms of data where KPIs are brought together and computed in a central repository to prevent conflict and incomparable reports. Also, up to the minute information is derived to show the state of business at the instance rather than historical data. Autonomy is preserved, and data is shown in context with classifiers that attribute KPIs as good or bad. Data can also be shown on highly visualized and aggregated level to highlight trends that can easily be spotted letting the users drill down to detail using top-down approaches. The eventual outcome is shortening the analysis-decision loop with the user better maintaining the train of thought.
All this presentation of data in highly granulated form is essential for better and faster decision making leading to a highly responsive Woolworth where time between thought and action is minimal in addressing threats and opportunities. The organization is aligned towards its objective because KPI definitions are centralized. Information is presented in highly visualized formats, selected information is pushed to end-users to help focus employee attention on critical success factors and measuring performances based on target KPI values.
Users/groups
Groups and users are requiring BI will vary based on their status in the organization. They can be classified as senior management, middle-level players, support staff, operational staff such as employees and mobile users. All these users and groups require specific requirements and output the number of variables for decision making and business support.
Producers in Woolworth involved in creating reports and analytics will need it more frequently than senior management. Consumers of business intelligence such as customers, public, suppliers and employees would need it less often. Their needs include reports and graphically represented charts required for them to make decisions quickly and respond to business opportunities and threats. For example, if a particular commodity in the store is receiving a negative review as a result of poor packaging or such concern, suppliers need to be informed for them to act expeditiously and correct the concern.
Apart from producers and consumers, there are collaborators required to improve the context with which information is presented. Collaborators in this case may be HP for BI services, Informatica for data integration, Business Objects from SAP for reporting and SAS for business analytics.
BI and DM Tools and technologies
Woolworth will require a number of BI and DM tools and technologies from different vendors and collaborators.BI tools and functions will vary according to the user. For instance, dashboards and scorecard will be required for executive decision making while IT staff will make use of analytic tools.
It will use HP Analytics and Data Management Service to align its personnel, processes and technology to output the right analytics and data management strategy.
Retail data dashboards will be instrumental for marketing executives both company-based and mobile.
It has identified Informatica as an enterprise data integration and management platform. Informatica is a leading data integration company with the ability to provide access to, integrate, and manage all Woolworth data in a trustworthy, actionable and authoritative manner.
SAS will provide business analytic services. The particular business analytic service desired for retail purposes is cross selling opportunities. This cross functional solution will address the challenges facing Woolworth by increasing customer relationships, measuring and managing risks and detecting and preventing fraud.
Finally, SAP Business Objects application will be deployed to provide reporting, data visualization, Enterprise Information Management and Enterprise Performance Management.
A SAP Business Objects report interface is as shown. It shows the number of employees based on regions
Internal and external data
Woolworths obtains a large pool of from its daily customers, suppliers, their employees and other collaborating agencies. Woolworths has over 180, 000 employees with 50, 000 employees operating in rural and regional locations. It also has more than 320,000 shareholders with 40,000 being employee shareholders. There are over 21 million customers per week across its retail business platform. The amount of data generated by the company is huge and tremendous. It remains critical the kind of data to be used for BI processes.
The company will use customer demography’s, likes and preferences as part of the BI process. However, private data touching on their personal aspects such as credit card numbers will not be passed for business intelligence.
Internal data include customer transactions, supplier information, employee information and inventory numbers. External data include stakeholder information, external partnership information and collaboration government regulatory and compliance information. The suitability of each data for BI is subject to approval from the originators of the data and top level management.
Architecture
Woolworth will employ distributed data architecture for business intelligence. The architecture utilizes an analytic framework. In this framework, consumer information and role based intelligence is critical. Role based business intelligence is where information only relevant to the users functions is provided. Of course, there are different types of consumers at different levels of the organization. A distributed architecture will support both internal users and those external to the organization.
An analytic framework is as shown above in Fig.1. The first layer of the framework depicts the support for a different kind of users.
The second layer will comprise what is known as Analytics component, and it is the layer where business applications reside. Analysis and business reporting is available in this component.
Training and support
The combination of internal and external training is advocated. At the onset of the implementation process, little technical support will be provided by the BI tools vendors. An external company will be contracted to train the first batch of BI users. Low-level employees and IT staff will not be in constant touch of BI and analytic tools. Hence, their training is not intensive as higher ranking users. For instance, IT staff will need skills on metadata, security data, administration, management, application and integration. However, their intrinsic value is low as compared to functional managers who need to draw, read and interpret BAM, tracking reports and spreadsheet queries.
Every BI and DM tool vendor is expected to provide basic training on its functionality at the initial stage after which the organization develops its training and support mechanism.
A budget of $250,000 has been set aside for training on analytics, data management and decision making. Initially, Woolworth staff in the rank of managers and above will be enrolled in training and support programs over a period of three months. After such a period, retraining and support will be conducted by knowledgeable Woolworth staff.
High-level budget
The anticipated budget for rolling out a business and enterprise data management solution in Woolworth is $800,000. This amount will go into obtaining the technologies and tools for business intelligence and data management, deployment, , training and support.
The budget is as follows:
References
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