Benefits of Business Intelligence in Retail

As we discuss the possibility of emerging into business intelligence software we must keep in mind the overall purpose of using any type of software is to reach strategic goals in order to increase market shares. I will discuss how business intelligence software will allow us to meet those strategic goals. We will establish what type of information and analysis capabilities will be available once this business intelligence software is implemented. We will discuss hardware and system software that will be required to run specific business intelligence software. Lastly, I will give a brief synopsis on three vendors (IBM, Microsoft Microsoft and Oracle) that are dominating the business information software

Decision Support Systems (DDS’s) can greatly enhance business processes in a number of ways by enabling consistent monitoring of Business Intelligence (BI) data from a number of sources. Foremost, these sources can include former Executive Decision Support (EDS) systems, Management Information Systems (MIS), including, transactional data captured via Transactional Processing Systems (TPS), and Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) systems. This academic paper will discuss Business Intelligence, (IT)-Business/ Alignment with the Business Strategy. Also, there will be an initiative to describe both objectives and levels of strategic planning, including, how each can be supported by (DDS). Initially, we begin by discussion of Business

BI provides the ability for an organization to take all its processes and capabilities and then convert these into knowledge, ultimately getting proper information for the right people, at the justified time, through the correct channel.

Microsoft® offers BI built around the already widely used Microsoft Office® suite. The primary BI component is Excel

There are five styles of BI as per MicroStratergy Corp. and they are: enterprise reporting(using dashboards and scorecards), cube analysis (slice-and-dice analysis), ad-hoc queries, data mining and statistics and finally alerting and report delivering. (Turban, Sharda, Delen, King, & Aronson, 2011, p. 12)

Business intelligence involves techniques based on computers that are used in the identification, extraction, as well as the analysis of business data(Electrosmart Ltd). The business data in this case could be revenue from sales made from given products, could also be sales that a given department has made, or

Business intelligence represents the use of series of tools to collect, analyze and extract information which can be used to aid the management process and decision making. It can help to reduce costs and increase revenue.

In the increasingly competitive global business environment, each organization needs to take advantage of every tool, opportunity, and advantage it can to achieve the best products and services, to gain and maintain market share, and keep stakeholders happy from investors and workers to supply chain and customers. The advance of data analysis has opened up new vistas to support decision making. Decision support systems (Sauter, 2010) have emerged that process various forms of data to build outcome models. These have been adopted in every segment of society, in the private and public sector, from political campaigns and the military to corporations and nonprofits alike. As a whole, the new set of tools involving the strategic use of data is called business intelligence. Within that general framework, the term analytics refers to the statistical, quantitative use of data to produce explanatory and predictive models for fact-based decision making. (Sauter, 2010).

Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. BI has been around long before computers and access to the internet. For example, an old ship building yard would have to keep track of its various transactions, employees, profit, suppliers, materials, etc. The shipyard owner would then turn this collected raw data into useful information in order to figure out where the company is going wrong and where it can improve. If the suppliers have not shipped on time for weeks the shipyard would know to find more reliable suppliers - this is a very simple example of utilizing business intelligence. In

BI technologies provide past, current and future business conditions. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-based procedure for analysing data and giving decision based information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions. BI comprises a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from different sources such as internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, analytic dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers. Simply put, Business Intelligence is technology process that assists in the conversion of raw data into meaningful information. It helps you analyse the past and come up with the strategy to improve the future. When organizations carry out their day- to -day operation, raw data is generated and mostly stored in a database .This data needs to be analysed and meaningful information extracted from it. Based on this output, come up with future strategy that will grow the company. Making future decisions directly from raw data is impossible as a result there is need for the data to be converted into meaningful data. Management makes use of this information to take fact based decision that will result to a better future. The data used for Business Intelligence analysis comes from OLTP (Online transaction processing).These are daily transaction that takes place

All great organizations share one thing in common, the use of business intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) provides tools that revolutionize the way organizations manage business and decision-making. It allows them to transform mass amounts of raw data into reliable information necessary to make important business decisions. BI delivers relevant and reliable information to those who seek it with the goal of achieving better decisions faster. An employee is independently able to navigate through a company’s data and find what he or she needs without relying on others. This means an organization no longer needs to dig through compiled webs of linked spreadsheets, analyze the data manually and mash together reports. Instead, employees can use BI systems to request the specific information that is useful for them (Hitachi Solutions Canada, 2014). BI allows managers to reach the most accurate and contemporaneous information an organization’s database cannot retrieve. The software offers applications for both data analysis and presentation of results. Applications such as data mining and decision support systems allow one to contemplate how he or she wants to analyze the data. Data mining refers to the process of searching for valuable business information in a large database, data warehouse, or data mart. Decision support systems combine models and data in an attempt to analyze semi structured and some unstructured problems with

ETL plays an important role in BI project today. ETL stands for extraction, transformation and loading.

“Technology creates visibility across the business, and enterprise-wide operational practices are essential to optimal efficiency and effectiveness. The strategic implementation of business intelligence tools and analytics, along with cross-departmental alignment, can transform data into meaningful, useful information for critical analysis. Proactive and investigative BI reporting techniques can help recognize new business opportunities and provide firms with a competitive industry advantage.” - Scott Lundstrom, group vice president and general manager of IDC Financial, Government and Health Insights (Sungard, 2014a).

Business Intelligence can be considered as a technology-driven process used for fetching useful and meaningful