Business intelligence for business success

Business intelligence is crucial to today’s retailers, but what type of solution is best? Jan de Jong explains

Business intelligence (BI) continues to rank among the top technology priorities for retailers. Why? Because meaningful, timely information about what is happening at the point of sale is increasingly vital for business success. BI empowers store, supply chain and enterprise managers to act quickly, in a coordinated and informed manner, to capture opportunities, outmanoeuvre competitors, please customers, and improve financial results. In addition, business intelligence and business applications are converging. This sets the stage for wider use of BI and real-time information for decision-making. Before industry standards guided retail technology development, standalone applications were commonplace and building integrated solutions was complicated and costly. Data elements were defined differently between, even within, companies. Applications were often proprietary, while analysis and reporting was batch-oriented.

Collaboration among retail managers was challenging, and integrating data or application silos into broader solutions such as business intelligence was truly daunting. Nowadays we have guidelines such as the ARTS standards. Of particular importance for BI is the ARTS Retail Data Model, the relational database design for all retail functions. Defined by retailers for retailers, the ARTS Retail Data Model provides a comprehensive set of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to help retailers understand and improve their operating performance. More and more retailers are adopting the model as a repository for a single instance of critical information. A robust BI solution capable of meeting retailers’ requirements must address four key areas. Firstly, collecting and storing data residing in multiple systems across the enterprise and on individual personal computers. Secondly, organising and analysing data to focus on KPIs and metrics meaningful to a specific business. Thirdly, displaying KPIs and metrics in clear, action-oriented formats targeted to the appropriate managers. And lastly, BI must be easily accessible so that team members can quickly collaborate on analysis, planning and action by means of a scorecard, workbench or role-based business processes.

In the area of organising and analysing data, Profitbase has captured the common POS operational data source connection criteria for POS data, based on ARTS Data Model naming conventions, in ready-to-use templates. Robust BI solutions can be quickly built with these templates. A Profitbase application aids this process and generates savings in mapping. Using Microsoft BI technology, SQL Server Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services, many standard reports can be produced. For more complex analysis and scorecard reporting, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can use the same data model.

Solution vendors such as Profitbase have already developed standard KPI templates, providing a rich reporting environment out-of-the-box. The final component for success is ensuring that analysis, metrics and KPIs can be quickly and easily accessed by retail team members 24/7, regardless of location. This is accomplished through the use of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Office System 2007. BI demonstrates that technology standards drive important business benefits for retailing, and should not be viewed as merely a ‘technology issue’.

As we move forward the necessity of BI to manage the business will become increasingly apparent. Standardsbased
offerings from Profitbase and Microsoft provide retailers a powerful, easy-to-deploy, affordable way forward in business intelligence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: As Microsoft’s worldwide industry executive, Jan De Jong is member of the executive team for the global coordination of Microsoft’s line-of-business solutions in distribution and services which includes the retail, hospitality and consumer goods industries. De Jong coordinates global aspects of Microsoft’s policies, strategies, objectives, and initiatives and focuses specifically on building strong customer and partner relationships for enterprise retail business solutions as well as the support for emerging markets. He has been leading the development of the Smarter Retailing Initiative of Microsoft launched in January 2004. De Jong is also a member of the board of directors of the National Retail Federation representing the associate members.

Further info: www.microsoft.com | www.Profitbase.com