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Ben & Jerry’s, Bigelow Tea and Business IntelligenceDonna SkeithDaquesnye TerryAmy StumpeSara ShuffieldPhil TallentWalden UniversityISYS-3001-3/MGMT-3005-3-Info Systems in Enterprise & Jerry’s, Bigelow Tea and Business IntelligenceThis paper is a compilation of group “D” Reponses to the case study titled, “Ben & Jerry’s, Bigelow Tea and Business Intelligence”. This study is the story of two companies and how business intelligence has transformed their business. Businesses are deluged with information but that information is not necessarily useful until that it is turned into business intelligence. The text uses the analogy of having bank accounts with millions of dollars but no ATM card to get the money out. CIO’s are tasked by the business to bring useful information to the table and enable companies to get a completive advantage over the competition.The first question from the case study consist of the following: Ben & Jerry’s track a wealth of information on each pint of ice cream and frozen yogurt. Ben & Jerry’s track a wealth of information on each pint of ice cream and frozen yogurt. If you were to design Ben & Jerry’s data warehouse, what dimensions of information would you include? As you develop your list of dimensions, consider every facet of Ben & Jerry’s business operations, from supply chain management to retail store monitoring.The information Ben & Jerry has available is amazing. Since it is better to have too much information than not enough, we would attempt to collect all data available. Everything from the types of ice cream and yogurt each supplier receives and sells, to the location of each seller. This would include information about flavors, quantities, sales, tracking & delivery information, stores, Counties, States, Cities, locations, customers, business partners, purchasing information, amounts and inventory. It is also important to know what neighborhood has the greatest sales for Ben and Jerry’s and time of year that sales are greatest. The vehicles used for transportation, speed of delivery, and directions traveled are also significant as well as any positive or negative feedback need to be catalogued.The second question from the text is about the subject matter of databases. Databases are the underlying technology that allows Ben & Jerry’s to track ice cream and frozen yogurt information. Based on your knowledge of data bases, what sort of tables or files of information would Ben & Jerry’s need in its database? What would be the primary keys for each of those? What would be the foreign keys among those to create the necessary relationships?Databases need to be designed in a manner where the information can be retrieved quickly. Ben & Jerry’s database needs to be designed so the business intelligence tools can work correctly. We all agree that a customer’s table is a requirement. The customers table would have columns designed for the tracking of attributes of customers. Some ideas that the group came up with for columns were: desires by groups, age groups, gender, and geographical area. The main key is the customer or business partner number. This key would be the link to all information tracking customers. In modern enterprise systems customers are called business partners because customers can also be suppliers or have other relationships. The differentiation is accomplished by customer type which would also be a foreign key. Another table that would be linked to the business partner table would be a remarks table keyed by customer number. The remarks table would have columns for ratings, Boolean answers like yes/no and a column for raw text. The table “plants” would track information about the manufacturing process. The key would be plant number. The plants table would need to track products made at that site’s address. These attributes would link back to the sales table and products tables. This is very helpful information in case of a product recall. Management could query the ship dates, products, SKU’s and track the product back to the plant. Finance and Controlling tables would be required for profitability reporting. There would need to be columns for account number and customer number. The account number can link the customer number and get a location for sales tax. It does not make sense to create a table for sales tax because most enterprise software uses a tax engine. The companies would need a table for raw materials called material master. In manufacturing all raw and finished goods have a material number which is the main key. The material table will relate to SKU’s, products, finance/controlling and plants. This will allow queries to be run and cost out materials.The third question from the text is about the use of the software Business Objects. According to the discussion of Bigelow Teas, part of the success of BusinessObjects comes from its look and fell being similar to Microsoft Excel. Why do you believe this is true? When introducing employees to enterprise-wide BI tools such as BusinessObjects, why is it an advantage to have the BI tool look like and work like personal productivity software tools? Why was the similar look and feel to spreadsheet software more important than word processing or presentation software? Before using BusinessObjects, Bigelow Teas had a system that was very difficult to use. Having a system that is confusing and not user-friendly can be very stressful to employees. Employees had such a difficult time finding the right information that they stopped using the software altogether. Excel is a very popular, universal spread sheet program that many people are familiar with. BusinessObjects has the look and feel of Excel. Employees were receptive to working the new software as they were already familiar with the format. As a result, it was easy for employees to learn and use. Having the identical experience to database spreadsheets gets the information into the record more rapidly so the entire information on how to advance the corporation can continually be restructured. It was much more user-friendly and allowed employees to access and view business intelligence in real time, predicts sales based on shipment levels, identify where to increase sales, and compare current consumer, sales, and marketing information all of which are essential to making the right business decisions. Having this new, improved system and being able to access this information helped lead to the success of the Bigelow Teas. Question four from the case study is how could Bigelow Teas open up its business intelligence information to its suppliers and resellers? What benefits would Bigelow Teas gain by keeping its suppliers and resellers more informed with business intelligence? What types of business intelligence would Bigelow Teas want to exclude its suppliers and resellers from seeing? Why?Bigelow Tea’s could provide suppliers and re-sellers with sales information showing them what teas sell best in different areas and at what time of the year. Bigelow’s could allow suppliers access to historical raw material needs. This would allow suppliers to assure Bigelow’s that their production of raw materials will match Bigelow’s needs, even during seasonal changes. For those that sell Bigelow Tea, being able to show the historic sales in not just their store but others may cause them to stock more of the tea and perhaps add teas they hadn't previously stocked. Bigelow Tea’s could also allow suppliers and re-sellers to access tracking information so they could track their shipments at all times. Sharing this type of information would allow both Bigelow and their business partners to conduct detailed, in-depth analysis of historical sales transactions, better anticipate demand, and relate their stocking positions to both short and long term trends. All parties could accurately track inventory throughout the entire supply chain from order through distribution centers to stores and to the sales floor. Things we would not share would be proprietary information, financial information, employee information, or ingredients of the teas. That type of information should not be shared because it could be detrimental to Bigelow. Recipes for the teas could be stolen and duplicated, allowing access to personnel records would be a breach of privacy and financial records access is not needed by others to ensure smooth operations.In the case study, question five says “Neil Hastie, CIO at TruServe Corporation, once described most decision making in all types of businesses as “a lot of by-guess and by-golly, a lot of by-gut, and a whole lot of paper reports.” That statement is not kind to managers in general or to IT specialists charged with providing the right people with the right technology to make the right decisions. What’s the key to turning Neil’s statement into a positive one? Is it training? Is it providing timely information access? Is it providing everyone with a wide assortment of data-mining tools? Other solutions? Perhaps it’s a combination of several answers’? Businesses make thousand of decisions yearly, and to be successful, those decisions should be guided by more than just gut feelings and guesses. We think if you took your business intelligence program and the decisions that were made based off the information they provided, you could come up with a compelling argument for using business intelligence. Education and training are both very important. You must be educated about how to use information and how to understand your business intelligence in order to use it to make smart decisions. The more training you have, the more educated you are, the better business decisions you can make.Ignorance of what a BI system can do for your business could lead to a failed business. Demonstrate to executives and employees alike, why and how you will want to make use of BI. Not everyone in every capacity would need access to BI and the information it provides, but, all should know what it is, why it is a good thing, and how it is used by the company.To make Neil’s comments positive the manager in question needs to have the necessary information accessible and in a user-friendly format to allow the manager’s decision making to be from actual knowledge instead of guesses. If he has clean data available to him, than most of the guessing has gone out of the game and guesses are exchanged with educated-guesses. Having the right information available is grouped along with having clean data (no errors), training (being information- and technology-literate), and data-mining tools (most important with technology-literate employees). It’s believed that education is the most important aspect to having the right info and knowing when you have the right info.In conclusion we have identified some key issues. Dimensions of the data for transformation into business intelligence are necessary for the business intelligence tools to create useful cubes for slicing and dicing information. A fabulous tool like BOBJ, a software company that specializes in business intelligence, is not very useful unless the data is plugged in correctly. Cubes are built from underlying database tables. When a database table is designed, there are multiple conditions to think about. Tables should be subject to data normalization to minimize data redundancy. The database designer must understand the effects of indexing on data retrieval. A large database of data that is too slow to retrieve may not be very useful in a fast paced business. Care must be taken to develop the proper foreign keys and unique keys to assure data accuracy and relationships. Another key point of discussion is introducing enterprise tools that the end user can relate to. End users at many companies do not receive much training so introducing analysis tools that have familiar look and feel of everyday productivity tools is comforting to the end user. One of the successes of BusinessObjects is their user interface. The interface can have the look of excel or the later versions use more dashboards are real time pie charts. Some final comments about the comments of CIO Neil Hastie: Since most large companies are competing globally now management cannot afford to fly by the seat of the pants or make call from gut instinct. To survive management must use business intelligence to stay on top of the situation. Companies rise and fall quickly. Remember the Rim and the Blackberry with their products being at the top. One small misstep can send stock prices plummeting. Apple is a good example that is in the news currently. Business intelligence is a major factor in companies rising to the top.ReferencesG, D. (2011, April 12). Webi as a dashboard. Retrieved from , S., & Cummings, M. (2009). Information systems essentials (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.Rafael, A., & Charen, S. (2008, October 14). 5 ways business intelligence can enhance inventory management. Retrieved from ................
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