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Discussion on: What is Business Intelligence (BI), how does it work, and benefit growing organizations?

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ncitujjwal

The Business Intelligent is the "computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing ‘hard’ business data, such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Business intelligence technologies provide views about the past, current and future business operations. BI helps us for reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, benchmarking, text mining etc. The major role of business intelligent is to support better business decision - making. BI system is technology based system and it uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal and structured data (RANJAN, 2009). Microsoft Excel, Oracle OBIEE, SAP business objects 4.0 is a widely used business intelligence tool. Now Google doc is also widely used BI tools.

The main objective of BI in business are:

  • First understand the internal and external strengths and weakness of firms.

  • Identify the opportunity of innovation.

  • Clearly understand the relationship between different data for better decision making.

  • Optimal uses of resources and reduce the operating cost.

It provide a unique approach and capabilities for building analytical applications. The widely used tools of BI are Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects 4.0. We have many choices and platform of BI platforms capabilities and use cases as well as many emerging BI technologies such as in memory analytics, interactive visualization 178 IT Application in Retail and BI integrated search (Stackowiak & Rayman, 2014).The idea of standardizing on one supplier for all of one’s BI capabilities is difficult to do. Increasingly, standardization is more about managing a portfolio of tools used for a set of capabilities and use cases.

Here I am going to discuss more about retail business intelligent. Retail business industry covered almost (6 to 7 %) world business economy and covers a large eco system -E-commerce, Apparel, Department Stores, Discount Drugstores, Discount Retailers, Electronics, Home Improvement, Specialty Grocery, Specialty Retailers and Consumer Product Goods Suppliers. Technology gives shoppers scientific pricing, effective promotion and detail product information in real - time. Application of iPhone, and Android and other smart phones, like Red Laser can scan barcodes and provide immediate price, product and cross - retailer comparisons. In Nepal, Bhatbhatani and Big mart are big superstore of retail business. They are using barcode system for scanning the product and they get information of price, product type and its stock limit. So this is a one of suitable example of BI in Nepal. Similarly in America, Wall mart has smart BI system, they used technology for customer service and getting information in real time. In America, at the time of hurricane the most selling items is water. So by using smart technology system they are able to maintain their stock, similarly Beer and Diper is another suitable example of Business Intelligent system.
Two major principle Product affinity technique and market basket analysis is applies in Retain BI for point of scale data. This analysis provides the clear insights of detail, types and price of product customer usually buy. In America, Diper and Beer is the unique product and suitable example of market basket analysis. It also provides the information about the time of year when the sales for a combination of products increase, destination items that attract customers to the store, and reasons for a sudden boost in the sales of a specific product. The analytical abilities of retail BI can identify correlations between customer profiles and product purchases and store visits.

These two technique or approach provides clear information of wall mart and grocery business. The market basket analysis first profile and classified into different categories such as grocery basket, special occasion, basket, weekly shopping basket based on the objective of the shopping trip as revealed by the analysis. The information can be used for planning and marketing and we can also make a decision based open these data. Similarly, product affinity gives the more data of product data and these data can lead the store manager to identify the products that most shoppers look for in the grocery shop and supper store. This will lead the store manager to place these products in an easily accessible area or identify the products that are bought together most often and display them in close vicinity or arrange the products identified as impulse purchases in an attractive manner to make the impulse irresistible (Cui & Damiani, 2017).

The major function of business intelligent system are:

  • To improve the effectiveness of marketing and promotion.

  • To design a planning strategic initiatives such as periodic promotions, campaigns, special offers, price changes, cross - selling, product - pairing.

  • To correct store performance with overall market performance.

  • To plan the store layout for more effective product placement and shelf presentation with appropriate prominence for impulse purchases, seasonal purchases, destination/anchor products.

References
Cui, Z., & Damiani, E. (2017). 'Benefits of Ontologies in Real Time Data Access. Digital Ecosystems and Technologies Conference, DEST '07 , 392-397.

RANJAN, J. (2009). BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: CONCEPTS, COMPONENTS, TECHNIQUES AND BENEFITS. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology , 60-65.

Stackowiak, R., & Rayman, J. (2014). Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions. Wiley Publishing, Inc.