Data Mining Key Elements, Reserve Stock Level, Business Continuity With Virtualization

Terminologies

1. Just-In-Time Delivery: Various companies especially the ones involved in manufacturing processes use this process with the aim of reducing the inventory cost (Koz?owski, Gola & ?wi?, 2014). There is waste reduction in inventory due to this procedure. Goods are received on the basis of the requirements of production process.

E-Commerce: This is a process where goods are sold over the internet. Online or electronic transactions are involved in an E-commerce system internet (Laudon & Traver, 2013).  Example of E-commerce websites is any online shopping website.

SaaS: The full form of SaaS is software as a service. It is a cloud computing model. The users can use application over the internet by paying certain amount of subscription amount (Kavis, 2014). The cloud service provider provides software solution through SaaS.

Strategic Planning: Strategic plans are made by following certain procedures. Strategic plans are made in order to get high productivity. It involves identification of highest priority jobs and managing resources in an optimal manner (Cassidy, 2016).

Supple Chain Systems: High performance supply chains are built through this system (Stadtler, 2015). Asset management and operation optimization is involved.

DSS: DSS stands for Decision Support System. It is a type of information system that can be used by an organization to take correct decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2016).  It helps the top management team to take decisions based on the data that is integrated form various departments of the company.

Cloud Infrastructure: Virtual or cloud infrastructure is deployed by most organizations in the present times. Cloud provides services through its infrastructure (Tomás & Tordsson, 2013). All the infrastructural facilities like software, storage, hardware and servers are provided by the cloud infrastructure.

Web 2: It is the second generation of technology and World Wide Web. Here it refers to the transition from static pages of HTML to the dynamic page. This enables the web communities to openly communicate.

Extranet: A private network can allow limited outsiders to access its information. This is known as extranet. Customers and suppliers of a company can access its useful information through extranet.

Big Data Analysis: This process involves the analysis of large amount of data. It helps to recognize and identify trends and patterns from the given information. Revenue factors can be detected by big data analysis. It can also be used for the purpose of basic monitoring (Du, 2014). Market trends as well as preferences of the customers are identified by big data analysis.

2. Data mining is the process of analyzing a huge amount of data in order to identify patterns and discover new information from it (Witten et al., 2016).  Data mining has certain key elements like:

Increased amount of data: Large quantity of data can be accessed and analyzed with the help of IT. Previously with would involve customers in it.

Prediction of future: All the information can be analyzed to predict some patterns and to predict future in a correct manner.

Decision making: Data mining has made it easier to take correct decisions.

Key Elements of Data Mining

Behavior of customers: Customer choices and preferences can be figured out by analyzing data through data mining.

Data structure: The structure of the database is complicated.

Incomplete information: During a survey people hesitate to disclose about themselves in details. They provide information that is not that secretive in nature. This leads to incomplete information collection.  

3. Companies face huge risk due to their stock level. They keep an extra stock in their inventory in order to overcome any type of problems that are faced in the future due to low level of stock. This is called the reserve level of stock. ERP systems have this functionality in order to help a firm to keep a watch on their stock level so that there is no difficulty in the future. This function helps a company warehouse to keep a level of stocks that are reserved for each sales order. The stocks are managed in a proper and effective manner. The process of production planning is also done efficiently.  Proper functioning of this system will generate for revenue for the company and it will also help to find out profit of the firm (Sustainment, 2014). Analysis of the latest or present year can be done by using the closing stock level.

The business of Liberty Wines had grown. This growth of business increased the data volume of Liberty Wines. The IT team had faced huge difficulty because they were facing issues in handling such a large data volume. The existing systems had slowed down. Maintenance of systems needed huge efforts of the team. They started giving attention to these issues and it was harming the productivity. All these led to less productivity. The impact on business processes was bad. Core businesses were harmed. Inventory management was affected in a severe way. The other affected business process was order processing system (Turban, Volonino & Wood, 2013). The facilities that they were providing to their customers were not up to the mark. Liberty Wines faced problem in handling the growth. The customers were not satisfied with their services. Liberty Wines had lost any chance of growing its business in the future and it also affected its present business situation. Customers were dissatisfied with them and it led to the loss of productivity of the business.   

The IT infrastructure is generally said to affect the company. It either has a negative impact or positive impact on the company. In this case, the IT infrastructure is said to act as a competitive advantage for the company. The cost of replacing hardware was reduced. There was improvement in the resilience. Power consumption was low. The backup system that was installed was stable and up to date. The applications that were used to run the business processes were enabled in order to increase the speed of all the business processes. This led to increase in customer satisfaction. Business had grown to a high level and the growth was quick too. Productivity and performance of the employees were improved. These effective points were responsible for giving Liberty Wines competitive advantages over their competitors.

Importance of Reserve Stock Level for ERP

Liberty Wines was benefitted because of the process of server virtualization. The number of servers was reduced because of the process of virtualization. Backup system had one server as its sub part. Power usage was reduced because of this system. There was sixty per cent decrease in the expense of air conditioners of the Liberty Wines. There was reduction in the carbon footprint. Applications had seemed to run at a faster rate as the servers were virtualized. There was no physical server present. Physical servers increase the system cost. It also consumes more power as compared to virtual servers. Implementation process of physical servers is much more complex than virtual servers. Virtual servers are the latest trend that is adopted by several organizations in the world. It helps to improve the productivity of the business processes and also helps to improve the productivity of the customers. The customer service of Liberty Wines was improved to a great extent. The inventory management had become very easy and simple. It was less cost consuming. Hardware cost had cut down to a great extent. In the process of virtualization it is very easy to add or remove servers without any complexity.

FinCEN stands for Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It is an agency of financial intelligence as well as Treasury Department of United States. The aim of FinCEN is to protect the financial system against any crime related to finance and promote security at a national level. The main IT and data problems that were stopping FinCEN from fighting against any financial crime was the inconsistent quality of data. There was no proper standardization. Data was not validated properly. They followed simple routines and were able to analyze only small set of data. They did not have the capability to analyze massive data and carry out proactive analysis along with prediction of trend (Turban, Volonino & Wood, 2013). Data were reported to agencies via offline systems. All these stopped FinCEN from detecting security threats in a quick manner. They could not even disrupt the activities of criminal enterprises.

Databases, IT infrastructure as well as analytics capabilities of FinCEN were improved and upgraded.  Analytics upgrade was of huge importance because that would help the bureau to carry out the data analyzing process from several resources. These data need to be given to Federal State. The examination abilities are improved. Legacy system’s data was upgraded to database’s new record system of FinCEN. Upgrading the IT infrastructure would help FinCEN to collect, store and process data electronically. FinCEN Query is a recent search app that is used for providing access to data on a real time basis. This is used by the FinCEN intelligence, analyst, law enforcement as well as the regulatory users. They can access the data of BSA that is Bank Secrecy Act.

Financial intelligence is the method of collecting data about financial issues and affairs. This is done to analyze and understand the nature of the financial reports and predict the future intentions. Financial intelligence tries to detect any type of money laundering, tax evasion and criminal activity that is taking place. Collection part is carried out by agency of the government. Analysis part is the most important part where the data is mined. Hence it can be said that financial intelligence is completely dependent on the methods of data analytics. It can be used for matching data in order to detect or identify any fraudulent act in the system. Reports of suspicious activities can be linked with different information in order identify any activity that is not legal or that is fraudulent in nature. If the data mining process is wrong then the entire system will face issue. It will not be able to detect crime in a proper way.

National security can reach high level by identifying relationships and patterns. This identification is extremely important because it can detect and mitigate any criminal act and illegal financial activity.

Crimes detected by FinCEN are money laundering and evasion of tax. Data analytics plays the most important role in crime detection as it analyzes the data and recognizes patterns to detect any illegal activity. It has other methods like profiling and behavior monitoring.

References

Cassidy, A. (2016). A practical guide to information systems strategic planning. CRC press.

Du, H. (2014). Big Data Analysis. Software Engineering Project. Software Engineering Project.

Kavis, M. J. (2014). Architecting the cloud: design decisions for cloud computing service models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). John Wiley & Sons.

Koz?owski, E., Gola, A., & ?wi?, A. (2014). Model of production control in just-in-time delivery system conditions. Advances in Manufacturing Science and Technology, 38(1).

Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2016). Management information system. Pearson Education India.

Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2013). E-commerce. Pearson.

Leon, A. (2014). Enterprise resource planning. McGraw-Hill Education.

Stadtler, H. (2015). Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Sustainment, A. (2014). Enterprise Resource Planning.

Tomás, L., & Tordsson, J. (2013, August). Improving cloud infrastructure utilization through overbooking. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Cloud and Autonomic Computing conference (p. 5). ACM.

Turban, E., Volonino, L., & Wood, G. (2013). Information technology for management: Advancing sustainable, profitable business growth . Hoboken.

Witten, I. H., Frank, E., Hall, M. A., & Pal, C. J. (2016). Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques. Morgan Kaufmann.