Share and be rewarded
Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 22 of November , 2007 at 5:30 pm
It is close to Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. Sinterklaas was a saint that gave away his money. We celebrate this every year by giving presents to our children. Sinterklaas was stolen by the Americans (sorry guys) and Coca-Cola turned him into the commercial Santa Claus. What does Sinterklaas has to do with Business Intelligence? BI is everywhere. If you are aware of it or not. There is an enormous amount of data. Either from your own transaction systems or from others in your network. Both structured and unstructured (just consider the internet). However I see a lot of customers not using this information for BI. Either they do not know how to use it, or have not thought about it yet. But there is also a group that doesn’t see the value of it. The ROI, or Return-On-Intelligence as I call it. At the same time we have consumers that act more unpredictable. They are better informed (again the internet) and react faster. Retaillers often don’t want to spend too much money on information systems. As long as sales are up they are happy. Why bother with extra costs. Therefore their focus is on ‘buy in store’ instead of management information. But if sales are up by 10% and the market revenue by 20% there is more money to be made. And now I have their attention. Benchmarking is a great way of making this insightful. The downside to bench marking is that it often only shows the average. And it easy to understand that nobody or nothing is the average. Therefore you need to slice and dice the information, to make a real comparison of store size, location, prices, models against a benchmark of the same granualarity. Your competition will probably not give you that information. So you need a trusted third party that collects point of sale information. Some of the major retail labels do this and some don’t. Who do you think performs better? The ones that keep the information to themselves or the ones that share? Happy Sinterklaas!
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system
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Comment by Matthijs Quak
Made Wednesday, 28 of November , 2007 at 3:54 pm
Jorgen,
I agree with you fully that BI is able to add value to retail organizations, not only internally but also externally. I belief we are nowadays witnessing a (slow but steady) change of culture within (retail) organizations towards sharing information with external stakeholders. They begin to see the immense value this information can, with the help of BI, generate for their organization. In a supply chain setting, as recent research that I did pointed out, BI can enable organizations to measure service levels, measure KPIs, conduct benchmarks, extract transform & load sources of data, create forecasts, give notifications and alerts, and enable the tracing of products. Once organizations start to see the benefits of supply chain collaboration and recognize the opportunities BI offers in supporting such a collaboration, I foresee higher adoption rates and supply chains that are not only more effective and efficient but also more profitable. In such a situation, the term Supply Chain Intelligence, as you coined it in a recent meeting we had, seems appropriate.
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