The Business Intelligence Case Study

Report Deliverables 

• Professional Report style of about 1600 words excluding table of contents and appendix. • Initial Draft Report due on before Friday of week 7. 
• Final Report due on or before Friday of week 12 

Requirements 

Part A 

Use at least 7 of the case studies covered in lectures and tutorial during weeks 1 to 10 to create a  summary on how business value has been created by the use of BI tools, methods and techniques. For this part you will need to analyse the 7 cases so as to identify: 

1. The types of problems / decisions that the businesses had to make (they may be grouped  into appropriate categories – no need to explicitly state what each one was). 2. Identify how Business Intelligence (using the term BI in its broadest sense) addressed the  problems / supported the decision making process. 
2. Identify the type of tools; methods and techniques used and how they were used to add  value to the business. 

[In the appendix to your report please include a list of the case studies used in your report. Include  title and text book page number(s).] 

Part B 

This part of the report builds on Part A by analysing two of the selected enterprises how their use of  BI has expanded and changed or could impact their future business since the text book was written).  In particular you will need to consider: 

1. Was BI used in innovative ways within that enterprise, and if so how? 
2. How changing trends and technologies (such as: Big Data, cloud, smart-phones, social  networks and RFID) has impacted (and modified) their business operations. 
3. You will also need to identify how these changes would add value to the business.

Marking Guide 

Delivery of draft as per schedule for at least Part A of the report (5%) Part A (10%) + Draft (5%) 

• Appropriate number of cases 

Part A.1: Types of problems and decision clearly identified and evaluated/assessed (4%) o Part A.2: Clarity in discussing how BI addressed the business issues (3%) 

Part A.3: How the use of BI adds value to the business (3%) 

• Clarity and completeness 

Part B (25%) 

• Depth of analysis of two selected cases. (5%) 
• Currency of information (5%) 

Evaluation and assessment of two cases (covering points B.1 to B.3) (15%) The final grade will also be affected by the quality of the report: by its clarity and readability;  including the use of styles and other appropriate text formatting; by the use of headers and  footers; the use of table of contents and Appendix. Part B will need to be fully referenced as per  Melbourne Polytechnic Style Guide.

Part A

Business intelligence can be a strategic tool to create value all the company's stakeholders. Business intelligence helps to bring about efficiencies in company processes and also helps to expand the revenues (Negash, 2010). Business intelligence involves using concepts like big data, social network cloud computing, smartphones, RFID etc. to create a source of competitive advantage for the company in the marketplace. Analytics helps to mine the data to derive meaningful insights from the enterprise data (Pendse, 2008). Social network helps to engage all the stakeholders in the value chain. Technologies like RFID help to track the items in the inventory. Similarly, other technologies help to bring about a lot of efficiencies in the value chain of business.

In this report, we will identify how the business intelligence tools, techniques, and methods are used to add value to the business. For this, we will first need to analysis seven case studies in order to identify the problems (Imhoff, 2008). First, we will identify the types of issues that businesses are facing. Second, we need to identify how the term 'business intelligence' is addressing the problem. Third, we will identify the types of methods, techniques, and tools used and how it adds value to the business. 

In the case of Central Transport Inc., Ms. Weber, the CEO of SAB Distribution had faced problem due to new challenges and wanted to integrate with Jean and Central Transport for transformation (Lock, 2014). SAB decided to add extra services to their business models such as warehousing, inventory management, and transportation delivery. The target group was larger retailers in the Mid-Atlantic States. SAB approached Wegman's Food Market, Inc. for their new services. Because Wegman was expanding the business and interested in selling the service at low cost and improve its services (Negash, 2010). 

In the case of Pete, the problem was that the new peanut product that was the spicy flavor cannot be stored for longer period. Pete's launched a new peanut product that was one month before the NCAA basketball playoffs (Rodriguez, Daniel, Casati, & Cappiello, 2010). Advertisements were done 3 weeks before the Final Four weekends such as Facebook, television, billboards, and newspaper. Each packet of Cinnamon peanut contains a serial number which would be matched with the winning number of Pete.  The price of a winning contest was a free trip of Final tour for 2 to next years (Rud, 2009). 

In the case of Red Fish-Blue Fish, LLP, the problem was that the sales of Red Fish-Blue Fish in the Asian market were very bad. Fran Fisher, CEO developed a web page for China, India, and Japan for sales. The mode used was the internet for sales (Rodriguez, Daniel, Casati, & Cappiello, 2010). 

In case of Ocean Spray Cranberries, the problem was that they wanted to maintain a shelf-stable drink category and also wanted to centralize its transportation activities. They also wanted to expand their logistics network where they had never accessed (Campbell, 2009). The method used was the third-party logistics (3PL) provider for developing Ocean Spray's transportation capabilities in order to support such a network. 

In the case of CPDW, both Harry and Jon had purchased a new building of 120000 square feet. Now, Harry wanted to utilize the building for a distribution facility in order to provide logistics services to the companies of Pennsylvania (Power, 2007). But the problem was that the building was already filled with pallets-loads of glass and area captured 110,000 square feet by Jon Parton who was the COO of the glass manufacturing company. Harry decided to change its performance metrics and decided to make a new pricing strategy. 

In the case of Paper2Go, the problem was that 92% of order fill rate was not acceptable in the market. Due to non-acceptance of order, Paper2Go was losing customers and not able to handle orders. Because of this reason, it was having a negative impact on profit (Rodriguez, Daniel, Casati, & Cappiello, 2010). To overcome these issues, Colleen decided to invest one million dollars in a new stock locator system for warehouses, increase on-time delivery of inbound shipping by contracting with the new carrier and increase the inventory amount by 10%. It also increased the transportation charge of the carrier by 10%. By doing all these changes, Colleen hoped that the order fill rate will increase to 98% (Negash, 2010). 

In the case of Bazinga Licensing Ltd, the problem was that BLL had no formal supply chain information system. The company was managing everything manually (Lock, 2014). This means starting from the inventory control till customer invoicing was done by hand in pre-printed forms. Later, all this information was entered into excel sheet for the record. Due to the lack of technological sophistication, the Mega-Mart company declines to place an order to BLL (Rud, 2009). To overcome these problems, BLL decided to make use of the technological instrument for manufacturing products. BLL also decided to follow the supply chain information system and used excel spreadsheets for pointing the sale data, digital transfers of orders and invoices automatically.