Group Assignment: Post # 2

B.I. tools (business intelligence) is the most important tool to help companies to understand their performance or make better decisions from their valueable databases.

In the following examples, we would like to describe how B.I. works and its benefits to companies.

Example #1 --- Interent order count and Customer count by Geography by Date by Product

In this report, we are looking for the buying behaviour of different people. We found our customers would prefer to buy our products by interent. This may be our users friendly and securely online purchase system, people are easy to shop online and purchase with safety protection. And we found that the sell of accessories is drop strictly, we have to make some change in the design or promotion.




Example #2 --- Order count by Product by Sales Channel by Promotion

In this report, we would like to know more about the success of promotion and sales channel. We found that the result of promotion is not good and cannot help in reseller orders. We have to promote our products in the other ways to increase sell orders.

And we found the internet orders are several times of reseller orders. We have to discuess with reseller how to increase sell orders by promotion or education. And we need to develop more sales channels to increase our market shares. We might set up a centre, people could buy our products through TV or phone orders.

Example #3 --- Standard Product Cost, Total Product Cost, Sales Amount, Gross Profit and Gross Profit Margin by Product by Date

In this report, we would like to know more about the cost and profit relationship. We found that accessories is the most profitable. We should develop and design more different accessories lines to make more profit. And we found bikes and components got around 10% profit in the past several years, we have to consider these products lines should be shot or not. We should pay more sources and attention to our most profitable products.

The benefits of allowing users to query a data warehouse in the form of an OLAP cube through their Web browser:

It is a tool to help companies to consolidate, analyse, and provide access to large amounts of data (current and historical) to improve decision making.

It contains a variety of tools for identifying trends and opportunities from the data.

Companies can gain from data by predicting future trends or extracting previously unknown insights from it. Moreover, it allows companies to take the initiative and proactively remain one step ahead of their comptitors.

It can help companies to make a good management analysis and decision making.

OLAP supports multidimensional data analysis. This allows the same data to be viewed in different ways or from different dimensions. And users can change the dimensions or data being viewed dynamically, unlike with paper-based reports.

Management can answer ad-hoc questions in a short amount of time, even when the data is stored in large databases.