Objective of BI
What is the role and benefit of data analytics in cybersecurity?
The objective if BI is to promote the usage of information systems worldwide. Globalization has increased the competition between different organizations. Data is now not collected and managed manually but it is done by the information systems. Database systems are used to manage the back-end processes. The BI applications have been widely used in the organizations to handle a large amount of information (Wixom et al., 2014). The companies have sensitive information that needs to be the safeguard from the security vulnerability. Business intelligence is the way by which data and be secured and accessed properly by an individual. Business intelligence is used by the companies to effectively manage the information and to analyze the weakness of an organization. BI means to manage the information that is accessed by the users on a large scale. Most of the SMEs also use BI for managing their daily business operations. Business intelligence and big data analysis allow retail companies to create the balanced scorecard for their business. Whether it is the healthcare sector, banks or business; the Business intelligence and big data analysis has become the most common way people can interact and attain competitive advantage in the market. This report will describe the importance of Business intelligence and big data analysis and how these can be implemented by the retail companies to manage their information assets for gaining overall market success.
According to Olszak & Zurada (2015), Retailers are continuously making efforts to attain competitive advantage in the market. There are various information management tools and techniques that are used by the retailers to contract with suppliers. But most of the time they have received failures. BI provides the way to the retailers to improve their current business processes by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of their business, opportunities and the related threats. Business intelligence offers opportunities to the companies to compare and contrast the business processes with other organizations (Mathaisel & Comm, 2017). Retails are the kind of small business that struggled a lot to attain competitive advantage in the market. Business intelligence provides access to many of its applications for managing organizational issues like management of financial resources. The BI tool is essentially used by the retailers to take decisions that are beneficial for their small business. However, most of this small business capable enough to implement these BI tools as they have issues regarding infrastructure, technological and cultural. The development of BI tools is crucial for small business and so the retailers have to be very careful while implementing such tools for their business growth. Product personalization can be done effectively by using BI tools. To support the procedures of business intelligence, big data analysis is done. Data becomes an effective asset for businesses as these are processed into the essential information. Big data provides a value, insights, and patterns for the important data of a business.
BI and Information Management
Retailers need to promote their business using a list of innovation which is possible by using technologies related to business intelligence (Larson & Chang, 2016). The three main intermediate stages include consolidation, optimization, and integration of business process with the implemented technology. When the data if a company is managed properly, it is easier to attract more of customers for a product or service. Business intelligence provides tools that sort the raw data into useful fragments. The business intelligence uses the ad-hoc technology which is later transformed into automation. These automated processes enable the companies to manage the accessed information BDAN (2017).
- Insights of a company can be analyzed such as product viability, demand for product supply, improvements in business procedures and determining the market position. This helps the companies to generate leads for marketing different products effectively. Business processes are optimized to the appropriate information (Laursen & Thorlund, 2016).
- Visualization can be done for the accomplishment of long-term goals. This has the positive impact on the decision-making This makes the calculations procedures much easier for the employees working for a business.
- Business intelligence allow centralization of data. The raw information is filtered and reduces the time required to export and import data. Through business intelligence, the data is gathered over a central hub which is accessed by anyone connected over the same network.
- It streamlines the business processes by reducing the complexities of data. It sorts the data according to the requirements and presents it into the formatted text. Benchmarking, computer modeling, and related technologies are used for such tasks to be accomplished Hillsberg (2017).
Owusu, (2017) describes the technological advancements are rapidly increasing worldwide, trends in business intelligence are also increasing.
- Artificial Intelligence- it provides the real-time data analysis for the information that is being accessed by the users (Ishikiriyama, Miro & Gomes, 2015). This gives better accuracy than the analysis done by the human. Artificial intelligence is preferred by most of the industries nowadays.
- Collaborative Business Intelligence- this allows the collaborative decision-making process for achieving business goals. This technology can also be accessed by anyone who is outside the IT team.
- Embedded Business Intelligence- this toll is used to perform business analytics for the business process (Hair et al., 2015). These allow business operations to be performed effectively and efficiently to provide better accessibility to the users.
- Cloud Analytics- this provides shorter deployment time for processing a large amount of information. It also provides large storage space for the users so that they can retrieve this information for future use.
These were some of the technology trends of BI (Business Intelligence) which can be used by the different companies to manage their business processes.
According to Pavkov (2016), the retailers every day deal with thousands of customers which provides a large amount of information. This consists of the details about the customers and the details about the product/services a customer has used. This data has to be mined because such transactions are difficult for a company to manage. This also affects the competitive advantage of a retail company in a negative manner. The database stores information for about 2.5 petabytes which is much larger in size (Park, Sawy & Fiss, 2017). This data overloads the database system which sometimes leads to the system failure. Using the process of inventory management, retail organizations try to understand the customer behavior with the help of collected information. Retail companies could make the right decisions using business intelligence software analytical tools.
The data is analyzed according to the number of customers who are visiting the store on a regular basis. If the customer visiting rate is lower than expected then the retail companies have to develop effective strategies for getting over the challenges they face. The retail companies have to assure that their inventory is bringing sufficient turn over so that they could attain a competitive advantage (Mauro, Greco & Grimaldi, 2015). The strength of a retail company is the human resources they have. It is important to have efficient employees in a company who could easily manage the resources. Employees construct better business strategies. Companies have to be aware of the interests of customers for the products/services they sell. It is necessary for the retail companies to know whether the customer requirements are fulfilled or not. Not only the requirements are considered but also to look after whether the customers are buying those products also which are recommended to them. The suggested products have to be reached for more number of customers to increase sales and marketing for a product. All these business strategies involve the cost of ownership that is managed by using business analytical tools and techniques. These tools allow businesses to manage the costs of ownership. The cost is distributed according to the requirements for financial, technical and other related resources. Most of the retail companies work on a lower budget (Tole, 2015). They believe in covering small investments so as to manage the loss in business (if occurs). To manage business losses, the retail company takes relevant advises from the business experts and acknowledge their ideas for bringing the best in the process of sales and marketing. Business intelligence allows retail companies to store the information and to retrieve it whenever required from the database system. As the competition level raises up in the market, the retail companies require business intelligence software tools to understand the current market demands. The business intelligence tools describe the trending technologies that are running in the market, business strategies used by the competitors, expenses required and the customizations that are needed Infruid (2017).
Retailers and Competitive Advantage
BI applications are used according to the stock analysis of a retail company. With the help of these tools, companies can effectively manage their stock and promote sales of a product. Some of the business intelligence applications are discussed below-
One of the main challenges of retail companies is to manage the pricing of products. The higher prices will eliminate the generated leads and the low prices will create a loss to the companies. Cost is managed according to the basic requirement for marketing the product and besides that, extra costs are also considered to have a backup (Sauter, 2014). The business decisions that are taken by the company managers depend upon the current scenario and is made applicable for a limited time such as for six months. It is because business trends and customer demands changes frequently, these are not same for every year. Customers appreciate the innovations that they view in the market as the customers get bored for the same product listing every-time they go on shopping. Effective stock management includes consideration of cost at a higher level.
After the discussion of sock management, customer analytics is another application of business intelligence that can be used by the retail companies. Customers mainly require the better quality of products and the affordable prices of the required products. There are two important characteristics that need to be considered socio-graphic and demographics when customers prefer shopping of products. The retail companies have to create the better shopping experience for online and offline shopping. Customer Analytics is used to understand the mindset of customers and their behavior (Schulz, Winter & Choi, 2015). Customer requirements need to be completed by the retail companies by applying appropriate strategies.
Vendors are the most required resources for a retail company. Association will knowledgeable vendors promote business growth. Vendor analysis is done by the companies to ensure that the product marketing is moving on a right track. Right marketing for right customers is essential business strategies for all the retail companies (Moro, Cortez & Rita, 2015). Effective vendor management helps the companies to achieve success in gaining competitive advantage in the market. Customer satisfaction with effective return policies is what required by the companies to attain competitive advantage.
Business intelligence tools provide the feature of scalability which enables retailers to compete with the external environment. It helps in determining the bestselling brands of the company, offers revenue rates for the other associated companies (Yeoh & Popovi?, 2016). The BI tools strategic decisions by first identifying the issues and then giving their appropriate solutions. Each company has their own specific targets that need to be accomplished in the certain duration of time. The strategic decision allows effective data transaction process for the retail companies. This feature of business intelligence enables the retail companies to restore the information about their competitors and to attain competitive strength.
BI Tools for Retailers
Due to a constant development of retail companies worldwide, managers have to be aware of the existing marketing trends and technologies. One among these is business intelligence applications. This helps the retail companies to achieve the competitive advantage within the global market. Success in the market is not an easy task to accomplish. It requires analysis of the potential risks associated with the company’s branding, competitor analysis, development of business strategies and many other phenomena are considered. It is a necessary aspect for the retailers to look after such issues like managing the information as it is their crucial assets as mentioned in the article by Bayer et al., (2017).
As discussed above, retailers are now accelerating their business to take it to heights, the use of business intelligence and big data has now increased more than it was earlier. Internet and automated technology have become most common for the small businesses to address the competition of the market (Stone & Woodcock, 2014). Social media platform is now providing better opportunities for the retail companies to store and manage a large number of clients all at once. Most of the companies were afraid of implementing such technologies that when the companies came to know that these are cost-effective to use, small companies started to implement it.
Business intelligence and Big Data analysis have allowed retail companies to use social media channels as the great source of retrieving information about the customers. Retail companies can collect information like transaction-based information which can provide opportunities to sell and market products on a large scale to the customers worldwide. This helps in attaining competitive advantage. This also helps the retail companies to expand their business to different areas where the demand for products is quite good (Koch, 2015). Business intelligence empowers the retail companies to be confident in their services, access accurate data and to appropriately understand the requirements of customers. Another part of retail businesses is the procedure of decision making. The decisions are made regarding the current business processes, customer needs are an availability of resources are examined and lastly, the views of retail business experts are collected to deeply acknowledge the requirements and strategies for their business.
It is important for retailers to communicate with the customers and go through the customer insights for analyzing customer behavior. The technology has enabled the people to interact with each other using social media channels, therefore, customers directly contact the retailers using social media platform. But in most cases, such information creates complexities while addressing the requests made by the customers (Arnott, Lizama & Song, 2017). The high-value customers are then analyzed by segregating the information that is collected from the customer request.
BI Applications for Retailers
In the earlier days of retailing, merchants used to serve the customers by interacting with them and giving them all the necessary details about a product/service (Pavkov, Poš?i? & Jakši?, 2016). Soon after the evolution of technology, merchants have started selling their products online by listing them on online shopping platforms like Amazon, eBay etc. The online shopping method has changed the procedures of business operations and the customer behavior. To understand the requirements of customers purchasing products online has become a crucial task (Bayer, Aksogan, Celik & Kondiloglu, 2017). But with the usage of big data analysis, small businesses are now able to manage their stores properly providing better user experience to the customers.
For the retail companies to manage the promotional rates of products, they need to gather an appropriate information about the specific requirements of the customers. Some of the requirements can be predicted while others are collected by the company managers by conducting surveys or sending questionnaires to the customers. Social media channels are helping most of the merchandise for collecting the necessary information (Owusu, 2017). Using analysis of customer data, retail companies can test the quality and efficiency of the products.
As discussed above, customer behavior and requirements can be analyzed using the social media channel. The activities that customer shares on their social media profiles help the retail companies to analyze what kind of products customer requires. However, it has become an easy task for the retail companies to sot the relevant information. But the most important task of all is to have better customer relationships so that managers can add their profiles to their social media account and visit them more frequently.
Costs are the major issue that needs to be resolved by the retail companies which may occur while managing the supply chain management system and product distribution. Optimization of such costs is effectively done by using the Big Data analysis (Olszak & Zurada, 2015). This helps the retail companies to create better utilization of their assets and to attain a competitive edge in the market. The insights to the customer information help in determining the resources that are required by the company, needs of asset and other important details required by the company. Operational Analytics and Supply Chain Analysis also help retail companies to take effective decisions and develop effective strategies for their small business Hitchcock (2018).
Conclusion
It can be concluded from this detailed report that business intelligence and big data analysis tools and technique is the most powerful tool for retail companies for measuring its competitive value. Globalization has allowed retailed companies to adapt trending technologies for having business growth. This report has provided detail knowledge about the importance, benefits and the procedure to attain the competitive advantage by the retail companies. Retail companies conduct small businesses and are expanded to various cities and countries across the world. These companies deal with the small number of clientele some of them are fixed while others are the random customers. The retail companies are trying to achieve competitive advantage in the market due to the increase in the number of population and thus increase in the number of real companies annually. There are three important things which can be summarized from this report that innovations, the price of product and product quality are the main aspects of sales and marketing process by which more number of customers are attracted for a retail company. However, the trends of business intelligence and the big data analysis are helpful for the retail companies to gain the competitive advantage as described in the report.
References
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