Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

70 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

3.1 The problem: warehouse growth for “Mom and Pop”

retail

InfoSphere Warehouse can be implemented to help deliver the key information

required to make informed decisions based on the data available. In this

scenario, as with most businesses, we start with our problem. Then, however, in

this chapter we move forward almost to the end of our story. We do this by

demonstrating how the analytics tools can present our transformed data in a

manner that best informs us of the information available, and allows us to

interrogate this information, to help drive business solutions.

Our example describes a medium-sized retail chain that has a number of outlets

in both the US and Canada. The CIO has been asked by the CEO to provide

more accurate information about their products and more importantly, the buying

habits of their clients.

Until now this information had been gathered from a number of sources and then

correlated and presented to senior management as a monthly set of reports.

From these reports the CEO built a picture of the business and planned the

actions of the company including which products to stock, when to place these

items on sale, and determine which stores were in a profit or loss status.

But it was taking too long to obtain and read these reports, and then make

decisions and feed the necessary actions back to the stores. The company’s

main competitors had been able to respond to the market faster and outsell this

retail chain. The CEO concluded that the report process was too slow,

cumbersome, and inaccurate to enable the company to be competitive in a

21st century business arena. Seeking a better way of doing business, the CEO

challenged the CIO to improve the situation, and quickly, to enable the company

to survive.

The CIO consulted with the in-house IT team to determine the best way to

resolve this problem. IBM was the retail chain’s IT supplier, so the IT team turned

to the IBM account team for help in handling this challenge.

The IBM account team met with both the CIO and IT team and explained the

benefits of applying an InfoSphere Warehouse solution to address the issue.

Although the CIO expressed concern about how long it might take to implement

this solution, this concern was soon alleviated when the account team proposed

using the solution packs that were developed for data warehousing.

When implementing the IBM InfoSphere Warehouse Pack For Customer Insight,

a business receives a set of prebuilt data models, consolidated database

schema structures, and report templates that support a consolidated view across