Business Intelligence

Retail Tracking Systems Retail Pro or MicroStrategy?

Retail Pro is Business Intelligence software that enables retail store owners to customize a “Point-of-Sale” (POS) method of retailing. The key feature of this software is the ability to create multiple revenues of sales inside one store. The software allows employees to select from an array of add-on modules to run a retail establishment using strategic planning and undergoing the various tasks involved operating a retail establishment.

Retail Pro is flexible, easy to use, and accommodates small businesses to large corporations by increasing retention and customer satisfaction by creating the “better client experience”. (Retail Pro International, 2010)

Retail Pro Software Features

• Software infrastructure
• Point of Sale and Store Operations
• Merchandising
• Central Customer Management
• Central Returns Management
• Oracle Database Engine

This software creates very flexible reporting of business data you need at the time you need it. The POS and back office has extensive capabilities creating a work flow customized upon the needs of your business such as inventory management, purchase ordering, integration with payment solutions, store replenishment, receiving, and employee management. Retail Pro is perfect for businesses starting out small and grows as the business grows. There are several modules that are centrally focused on what types of products you sell in your retail establishment. Some of these modules are as listed:

• Gifts and Toy Solutions Hard Goods Solutions
• Home Furnishing Solutions
• Specialty Apparel Solutions
• Jewelry Solutions

Each of these modules specialize in helping keep track of inventory, merchandising, customer management using role-specific dashboards capable of period to period analysis and reporting to improve business, store performance, and profit margins. The advantages of its Business Intelligence is that it saves time and money, improves profit margins, increases business and store performance, and maximizes returns on existing data sources. Retail Pro International, 2010) MicroStrategy is Business Intelligence Software for retail tracking systems in the palm of your hand. It’s the Mobile Business Intelligence that applies iPad as a business tool. You can access dashboards to create brilliant business analysis and reports any time, any where. Besides having extraordinary displays for data, MicroStrategy includes the following features:

• Unlimited data analysis
• Data mining
• Forecasting
• Operations Management
• Executive decision making

MicroStrategy’s mobile iPhone and iPad views videos on YouTube and views Podcasts in iTunes. This mobile retail tracking system even comes with a free custom dashboard. The Business Intelligence Architecture is low in cost for ownership and delivers high performance and sophisticated analytics. If you are interested in Beta Programs, there are options one can participate. The following is what is included in MicroStrategy’s business applications:

• Mobile Business Intelligence Financial Analysis
• HR Analytics
• Supply Chain Analytics
• Sales Analytics
• CRM
• Balanced Scoreboard

MicroStrategy is World Class Business Intelligence for all your business needs. It is very user friendly migrating from departmental Business Intelligence to enterprise Business Intelligence. MicroStrategy can develop and deploy department Business Intelligence applications quickly and deliver enterprise Business Intelligence with higher performance and efficiency. (MicroStrategy, 2010)

I knew there was a strategy involved in running a retail establishment, but I did not realize that retail tracking systems available today creating your Point-of-Sale could be as easy as using the computer to keep track of the elements involved in various levels regarding merchandizing to keeping inventory, customer satisfaction to the “better client experience, and payment solutions to business analysis reports. It is wonderful to know that there are solutions you can implement that can make your business experience a good one!

What features of a Point-of-Sale retail tracking system would be important to me would be directly related to how I plan to expand my business levels beyond the brick and mortar retail establishment. My boutique is going to retail various products that I create and design myself which includes fashion design apparel, jewelry, home decor items, Nature Crafts, custom-made gifts, and toys—items that are included inside my product labels of my brand. I would have to start out with a tracking system that meets these needs to run my retail establishment which are as follows:

1. Inventory Management system for each label separately Merchandising of products under each label separately
2. Payment Solutions that allow payment by other methods that are not cash purchases
3. Customer Management
4. Point-of-Sale options
5. Business Intelligence for analytical reports and business operations
6. Employee Management
7. Consumer behavior, geographical, economic, and social trends statistics
8. Security of business operations and store location I plan to add to my business by featuring instructional classes teaching various types of crafts a couple times a week, changing the activities when consumer interest and participation changes.

I am also adding a new element of offering custom designed clothing and accessories upon customer request. A couple of my product labels will expand in the operations of how the product is presented to consumers by expanding the activities and product in various ways. Basically, the changes that will happen beyond the brick and mortar retail establishment will happen upon expanding the different business levels of each label, adding a few new features that compliment the products, and by getting customer participation teaching various art activities.

I will also expand my marketing boundaries by adding a website customers can purchase my products, contemplate the possibilities of creating a product catalog, and have certain products available to consumers placed in other stores that carry similar items. Plans of expansion beyond the retail location will need a more complex Point-of-sale retail tracking system than what would already be in place. Features I would consider important due to the changes of business operations at this point would be as follows:

• Multiple levels of sales reflecting the expansion of the various labels group
• Website operations and Point-of-Sale system attached to various labels group
• Packaging and drop shipping department added to business operations which will require a more complex system so that product sales are attached to correct label group
• Retail accounts added to business revenue
• Adding a Point-of-Sale system that involves the custom designed apparel made upon customer requests, or alterations made to purchased store apparel
• Customizable Business Intelligence features and POS system accommodating business expansion levels

Based upon my business needs at the beginning of my retail establishment, features that I would require of a POS retail tracking system would be relatively basic of retail operations and tasks. I would want to start my retail business operations with a POS tracking system that would allow the changes of various nature when I started to expand my business operations. Of the two tracking systems discussed in this report, Retail Pro and MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Software, the system I feel would be the best fit would be Retail Pro because of the versatility of the Business Intelligence features the software includes.

Retail Pro has the capability of customizing the system of operations to accommodate the complexity of each product label group as expansion is implemented. My business level of operations is definitely one that does not resemble what would be considered a traditional retail system of operations because each product label is considered to be a separate unit of business to start. When expansion changes the avenues on which each product label makes revenue, the already in-place POS tracking system has to be able to accommodate these changes.

Retail Pro’s features and customizable system of operations can accommodate changes very easily. Even with the most complex system of operations a business could have, Retail Pro would be the best fit to meet all the needs and expectations I need to operate my retail business. MicroStrategy is, in my opinion, not as convenient a fit for my establishment and nature of my multiple revenue types because the product’s mobile capabilities is not a feature I consider important, if at all, when choosing a POS retail tracking system and it working efficiently for its purpose matching the structure of my business operations. I would use a POS retail tracking system upon business start-up because starting my POS system as the business grows will be a positive action that will get results for the purpose of the tracking system benefits. As my business grows, doing business without a tracking system in place would be a sure failure.

COURSEWORK BRIEF This coursework is worth 60% of the total module marks available for this module. This is an individual piece of work. You have been asked to review and propose a course of action for a large online retailer (www. argos. co. uk) as an independent web analytics consultant. Your review should include an overview of the site, stating where and what web analytics techniques and tools you could use. Indicating the rationale for this and how it could be used to understand visitors’ behaviour, clickstream, and how to improve the website’s success, performance and business decision making.

You should also include in your overview, a discussion about how Argos’s business intelligence can be linked to its web analytics data, providing a case for this based on academic theory. This coursework should take the form of a REPORT and should be no longer than 2500 words, excluding executive summary, tables, diagrams and references. It is expected that you provide academic support for your proposed solutions, discussions analysis and recommendations. MARKING CRITERIA The marking criteria are the things that marks will be awarded against.

They should not be seen as the structure of the report nor expected headings of your report. • Executive summary ; introduction – 10% • Analysis of the ARGOS Web site – 20% • Discussion and analysis about the link between business intelligence and Web analytics for ARGOS – 20% • Making recommendations/suggestions for the appropriate use of Web analytics tools in order to understand the visitors’ behaviour, improve the Web site usage and business performance – 30% • Conclusions – 10% • Choice of references properly cited within the work – 10%

Whenever an existing technology tool suddenly becomes more accessible to a greater number of people, it is  said that it has been “democratized.” In recent years, the ability to immediately access vast amounts of digitally available on-demand business information (often via mobile means) has truly become widespread, which has in turn led to the democratization of business intelligence technology.

BI in the era of big data.

A simplified explanation of the role of business intelligence (“BI”) is that it enables organizations to use data to improve their decision-making processes. Business intelligence technology generally describes the software, hardware, and platforms designed to allow businesses to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data.

BI itself is nothing new, and large corporations around the world have been utilizing its various forms for decades. The concept of BI emerged circa 1996, when a report stated that “By 2000, ‘Information Democracy’ will emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers, and the public.”

However, previous to the current era of democratization of BI (starting about five years ago) smaller organizations were essentially precluded from being able to really benefit from BI.

Many large corporations will typically employ a “chief data officer” to take charge of BI, a function that ps (at least on paper) operational and departmental silos. The chief data officer’s work with CIOs overlaps with a chief privacy officer, CSO, CTO, etc. Pre-democratization those smaller organizations and companies just didn’t have the means and resources necessary to collect and interpret large amounts of data… let alone deploy it as BI in any sort of meaningful or coherent way.

However, as everyone who pays attention to such things knows, we are currently in the era of big data, a new-world paradigm where companies are able to efficiently capture and analyze data at volumes that were both impossible and unthinkable just a few years ago. These advances are making it possible for SMBs to share in the insights that data analysis brings — often without the need for data warehouses, large IT staff or expensive hardware. Pre-democratization of BI, only blue chip companies with expansive IT departments really had ready access to data results, and SMBs were relegated to relying on observation and gut instinct, which, even when honed through decades of experience and wisdom, was a pretty risky way to make big decisions. Now, the playing field is becoming level.

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“The mainstream SMB community is only now experiencing the reality of Gartner’s aforementioned ‘Information Democracy’ prediction,” according to  who researches BI and Advanced Analytics. “Until public cloud options were available, most SMBs simply relied on using Microsoft Excel or reporting capabilities built into the applications they were able to afford to use.”

Hare continues, “We also have  a trend in the growth of SaaS-based analytic applications focused on solving domain and industry vertical business needs, with users able to quickly setup and use these SaaS analytic applications without involving IT. And, these analytic apps tailor the analytics and information delivery for the role of the user…rather than requiring the user learn the tool.”

On that note, one interesting company clearly riding the BI democratization wave is a  venture-backed startup called Sisense, which says its mission is to “simplify business analytics for complex data.”

“Our entire focus and claim to fame is helping business people who choose to deal with data that is complex . . . without any IT investment, any data warehouse,” says . The company, headquartered in New York City with an R & D Center in Tel Aviv, has over 1,000 clients in 50 countries, ranging from SMBs to giant conglomerates.

SMBs, in fact, make up over 50 percent of Sisense’s business. According to Orad, this makes perfect sense, because “especially modern SMBs, newly formed SMBs…have way more data… because they started their companies in an era where you track everything, log everything, they’re using the cloud 24/7, and they need to make sense of it all.”

How does this particular group use BI technology to mine data for insight answers? By way of one example, we consulted James M. Levine, director of analytics for Act-On Software, Inc., a four-year old company that develops digital solutions for the marketing profession. Levine’s job is to provide analytic resources for the company and its executive team.

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“Finding a BI tool with the ability to scale and grow with a business is critical in driving value,” Levine says. The company uses Sisense tools to help them gain better insight into the various data gathered and to automate the generation of time-and-labor intensive reports. During Act-On’s four-year relationship with Sisense, a central web portal for all data has been created, executives have direct access and visibility into real-time metrics for performance improvement, and the company is able to take a proactive approach to preventing churn and reducing sales loss. Critical data showing the lifecycle of a customer and allowing intelligent predictions that drive change to the Act-On business model has been a plus, Levine says. Only one additional analyst was needed to help Levine support his entire organization’s data analysis needs after implementation of the Sisense solution, without which it would have taken 15 to 20 analysts to provide the same value, he says.

“We have been able to build and design tools and processes within Sisense that have replaced other vendor tools and saved us money in the process. For example, we deliver commissions to our sales reps through Sisense, eliminating the need for a commission delivery tool,” Levine says.

The Data fits.

It is not just high tech SMBs that are benefiting from the democratization of BI, Orad says. “We have a client that designs and makes very expensive shoes, and although they are a small, boutique factory, they have one particular significantly complex data challenge.”

There are at least 10 “data needs” for each individual shoe design… such as the model, leather, size, etc. “I never knew it could be so complex. They sell custom shoes and need to know which shoe they can offer in real time by making analytical decisions on the fly. So, someone smart in this tiny shoe factory said ‘We have all this data, if we can decide analytics quickly, we can supply our customers much more rapidly by relaying via mobile phone which shoes can be readily available.”

Any structure of data for each shoe, i.e. any information… from sales to inventory, anything that is numbers, letters, names, etc. can be sliced and diced by the Sisense BI tools. This tiny shoe factory is a perfect example of how even the smallest  boutique now enjoys access to the same powerful technologies as large corporations.

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According to Orad, Sisense tools are “designed to be used by people who need to consume and analyze large amounts of data…but have little or no prior experience in data crunching.”

Hare said traditional BI platforms required IT to “install a data warehouse, integrate it with the transactional applications, model the data, and build dashboards and reports for the business users, and run reports that often took hours, making it impossible to interact with the system. By then, information would often be days or weeks old.”

With modern BI tools, the performance is “significantly faster,” Hare says, allowing business users to interact with data and gain more real-time insights. “This means business users are now empowered to build their own dashboards, explore data, collaborate and share results more quickly with the rest of the organization.”

Currently, the biggest challenge SMBs face while implementing BI and analytics tools is the lack of a skilled workforce, because most of the blue-chip well-established BI solutions require full-time database administrators (DBAs) to implement and maintain them. “Any BI solution that requires a lot of IT intervention, generally, those are not the right ones for an SMB,” says Hare.

SMBs need to look for self-serve BI solutions that are SaaS or cloud-based to minimize the need for IT resources to deploy and maintain the tools.

With new tools like those from Sisense and other BI tech companies, crucial data that supports real-time decision making across every level of an organization is quickly available — without prepping the data or making requests to someone in IT to pull the info.

By putting the data in the hands of those who make the decisions by using systems that can crunch big data without the need for expensive hardware or an IT background, the democratization of business intelligence is here, it’s real and it is spectacular.