How Business Value Is Created With BI Tools: An Analysis Of Seven Case Studies

Case Study 1: Giant Food Stores Prices the Entire Store

This report represents seven case studies, to understand the business value with the help of BI (Business Intelligence) tools, methods and techniques. All the seven case studies will be analyzed and the types of problems and evaluated decision will be summarized; how the BI tool addressed the business issues will be discussed and the used BI tool, methods and techniques to add value to the business will be identified.

The Giant Food Stores is a supermarket chain, which followed a narrow Every Day Low Price strategy on most of its products and old promotion system that failed to keep up with the pricing decisions, which a fast paced grocery market requires. It limited the execution of sophisticated pricing strategies. Moreover, the pricing rules were not documented. The company even had no means to forecasting the impact of the rule changes, before the prices hit the store shelves. Then, the decision of deploying a system to take care of the pricing decisions were made.

The number of patients coming to the clinic and their location in the five mile radius. PersonicX is used to determine the well represented clusters for urgent care clinic database and provide highest ROI.

The data base of the clinic and the PersonicX software’s geospatial analysis capability were used to find the clinic’s location where 80 percentage of clinic’s patient lived, where marketing was concentrated within 5 mile radius, to add value to the business.

This case refers to a marketing intelligence firm, which faced increased competition and required deciding whether to change its location or change its marketing practices to increase its income. Acxiom’s PersonicX system was decided to use which concentrated to locate the areas of the clinic’s target audience.

Business Intelligence here includes the distraction strategy which was used to resolve the problem of waiting time. However, instead of adding a new elevator only the full length mirrors were added.

Here, the distraction technique is used for the second case study, where instead of adding a new elevator, only the full length mirrors were added which costs comparatively very less. The proposed solution and the cost has huge difference.

This case study refers to an elevator, which denotes the problem of managing complaints related to the slow elevators in a tall hotel tower, which required a lot of waiting time. To resolve this problem, it was decided to install a full length mirrors on the doors of the elevator on each floor. This resulted to distract the men by looking at women and the women to look at themselves for adjustments.

Case Study 2: Location, Location, Location

This case study refers to, Pacific Sunware’s problem, where the retailer offering casual fashion styles wanted a system that can help in determining the styles, colors and sizes, which are sold in respective stores, for helping in the purchase decisions of inventory.

The BI reporting platform helped to track the store and the performance of the product. On the other hand, it helps to take better decisions related to managing the store, its operations, planning, merchandizing etc.

So, Pacific Sunwear, built Netezza data warehouse and utilized MicroStrategy’s BI reporting platform, which helped in tracking the store and the performance of the product. Additionally, it helps to take better decisions related to managing the store, its operations, planning, merchandizing etc., which adds value to the business.

The Finnish Air force lacked efficient maintenance system, to maintain aircrafts for the purpose of missions, training and for various other tasks.

For Finnish Air force, the maintenance program is divided into three levels like organizational level, intermediate level and depot-level. The event simulation program was used for accommodating the problems related to task times, workforce problems, handling material delays and failure of equipment.  

The simulation model is implemented with the help of Arena software which uses the GUI (Graphical user interface) and (Visual Basic for applications) VBA.

In a firm, a problem was encountered, which results in loss of $250, 000, every year. The manager’s issues are related to the overseas assignments, which refers to predicting whether a particular assignment is a good or a bad experience for the managers and their family (Turban, Sharda and Delen, 2011). The Neural technologies for preventing fraud, and Minotaur was installed to decline the fraud and loss.

Additionally, IAP provides better preparation of transfer, reduction in compromised assignments etc., and every year it saves millions of dollar for the large organization (Turban, Sharda and Delen, 2011).

The intelligent DSS helps in determining the success of the overseas assignments.

A global pharmaceutical company named GSK is considered, which sells various products related to oral health, nutritional drinks and so on. The demand of the competitive retail market has lead the company to face problems in maintain the quantity of the products, to ensure high level of service, for the customers. This problem has occurred due to excess inventory cost, thus it needs an optimal inventory policy to accomplish decent profit.

The steps it took includes, rom supply chain planning system, it gathered all its sales information, demand information, month-end inventory information, production and lead time information. Next, it developed a model, for estimating the safety stock, with the provided inputs.

The spread-sheet tool (Microsoft excel) was utilized for building the model.

The company was able to evaluate this depending on the, excel based DSS. Thus, it has helped the managers of the company, to take inventory decisions (Turban, Sharda and Delen, 2011).

References

Turban, E., Sharda, R. and Delen, D. (2011). Decision support and business intelligence systems. 9th ed.