Big Data Implementation: A Report on Bunnings Hardware Success

This report analyzes the application of big data strategies at Bunnings Hardware, a leading company in the hardware business. It emphasizes Bunnings' focus on customer satisfaction through technology adoption and understanding evolving consumer preferences. The report recommends various big data implementation approaches, including selecting appropriate software development methodologies like iterative and agile processes. It also stresses the importance of balancing skills, budgets, and risk assessment. Furthermore, the report highlights the significance of a well-defined big data roadmap and suggests hiring consultants, conducting training, and setting realistic expectations for successful implementation. The report also touches upon big data visualization tools, big data technologies, big data sources, and big data adoption challenges and governance that Bunnings Hardware should be aware of, ultimately aiming to improve efficiency and decision-making processes within the business.

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Big Data Basics
Student Name
Institutional Affiliation

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Executive Summary
Bunnings Hardware is among the leading company in hardware business and has also won the
marketing race as a retail juggernaut because of its accessibility. The company is investing more
in ensuring the customers are able to enjoy the best services and have a quality experience while
interacting or making their purchases. One of the approach that the business has adopted to beat
its competitors is by making things easily identifiable without the customers having to take
longer time to search for what they want. The business wants to ensure that customers are
satisfied with the services and products that they receive. One of the reasons that limits
businesses from expanding is because they cannot comprehend on the changing customer
preferences and habits. Bunnings have invested heavily in researching on the changing consumer
preferences, what triggers them, and their changing buying habits and this has made it to be on
top. By paying attention to consumer patterns, Bunnings have been able to stay ahead of its
competitors. This report recommends the various big data implementation approaches, big data
visualizations tools, big data technologies, big data sources, and big data adoption challenges and
governance that Bunnings Hardware should be aware of.

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................1
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Business Priority..............................................................................................................................4
Big Data Approach..........................................................................................................................5
Information and sources..................................................................................................................7
Big data technologies.......................................................................................................................8
Big Data Visualization.....................................................................................................................9
Big data adoption challenges and governance...............................................................................11
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................12
Reference List................................................................................................................................12

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Introduction
Big data is a concept that has been a concept that has been around for quite some time but people
still do not have sufficient information on what this concept is all about. This is because big data
is evolving continually making it one of the major causes of digital revolution including internet
of things, data science, and artificial intelligence. The concept of big data arose from the
increasing amount of data that is being collected every day since the emergence of digital age.
The increasing use of the internet, computers, and emerging technologies of data collection
across the globe. The amount of electronic data available have increased from zettabytes to more
than 50 zettabytes (Dhar, 2014). A lot of data is generated every time users go online leaving
behind digital trails.
Big data can be defined as collection of vast amount of data form numerous sources and
analyzing them to get deeper insights, identify strengths and opportunities that the business may
adopt to increase productivity. More so, business weaknesses can be identified and addressed.
Big data operate on the principle of the more you know the more you can predict the future about
a particular situation or something. By analyzing the big data, identifying relationship, and
making comparison of the data points, more insights and knowledge that was initially hidden can
be uncovered and can be used to make smarter and more informed decisions. This can be
achieved by building models of the data captured, tweaking the values, running simulations, and
monitoring the effect of the results.
Big data has made it possible to collect and analyze data because of the advanced data analytics
and storage and data can refer to anything from written texts, photos, sound recordings,
databases, videos, and sensor data. Big data employs business intelligence to ensure that more
opportunities and useful trends can be making sense of the vast amount of messy data by training
computers to determine what the different data represents such through natural language
processing or image recognition among other technologies (Kirkpatrick, 2013).
This report seeks to discuss how Bunnings Hardware have been employing the use of big data or
the new strategies that can be implemented to improve the efficiency and decision making
process for the business. More focus will be on business priority, the approaches that the

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business can employ in implementing big data, the sources of big data information, big data
technologies, big data visualization, and the challenges of adopting big data.
Business Priority
Bunnings Hardware has done well in the hardware business and has secured its brand as the most
trusted business in the country. It has also won the marketing race as a retail juggernaut because
of its accessibility. The business focuses more on making it easy for the customers to access by
employing and adopting technology. Bunnings hardware have always embraced technology to
market their business and products and identify the various customer preferences. Many other
retailers have tried to adopt Bunnings’ strategies but they have not done it better than Bunnings.
Several factors have helped the business get to the top and maintain the position (CDCGroup,
2018). One of the factors is putting everything under one roof allows the customers to get all
what they need without having to go to different stores. Additionally, the business has made all
the gadgets and hardware easily accessible to all the shoppers. The business has invested more in
customer service to ensure that the customers get excellent services in addition to clever
marketing and cheap prices. Bunnings embraced the challenge from bigger rivals such as
Masters without losing the customers.
One technique that Bunnings used to beat its rivals is by making things easily identifiable
without the customers having to take longer time to search for what they want. Additionally, the
business introduced its product line for instance Ozito, which could not be found in any other
store (Bunnings, 2018). By implementing all these strategies, Bunnings was able to increase the
profit that they make by 11.6%. The business wants to ensure that customers are satisfied with
the services and products that they receive. One of the reasons that limits businesses from
expanding is because they cannot comprehend on the changing customer preferences and habits.
Bunnings have invested heavily in researching on the changing consumer preferences, what
triggers them, and their changing buying habits and this has made it to be on top. By paying
attention to consumer patterns, Bunnings have been able to stay ahead of its competitors.
Essentially, the business is focusing on what the customers want and how they want it. The
changing customer habits and behaviors cannot be determined at a glance and requires immense
amount of data to get greater insights. As such, Bunnings is focusing on using the available data
to get more insights and knowledge about its customers. Big data will allow the business to

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identify the strengths, opportunities, and weaknesses that the customer can use to better its
service delivery (Cowlishaw, 2018). Another strategy that the business can look into is by
intervening when the customer environment changes such as when they relocate or change the
surrounding on them such as changing the prices on the items that the customers often purchase.
This can be a very difficult task if there is insufficient data.
Big Data Approach
Depending on the business objectives and the road maps, strategy, and plans for implementing
big data are different. Furthermore, the amount of risk that the business can accommodate and
the maturity of the environment for managing data also dictates the big data approach. As such,
Bunnings Hardware should put into consideration all the issues that will facilitate the business to
identify an implementation plan. Some of the factors to be considered include business urgency
and the need to have big data. Bunnings being an ambitious company need to use the greatest
and latest technology (Waterman and Hendler, 2013). The business ca show how big data can be
used to come up with new strategies to drive the business. As such, there is need to have a plan
and strategy of adopting big data solution. Implementation of big data should not be assumed as
defined project. By adopting big data, the strategies of data management will change. Therefore,
it is essential to define the time required to design big data solution. Designed tasks should never
be eliminated or glossed over. The following are some of the steps that can be followed to
successfully implement a big data solution:
Step 1: choose the appropriate and most reliable big data software development approach.
Bunnings Hardware have IT department that follows defined practices and processes of
development. The business can adopt some of these methodologies while implementing big data
solution. Interactive and agile development processes can be better suited for big data project
(You, Ogiela and Hwang, 2015). This is because better and rapid results can be received in
iterative methodologies because of the constant involvement of the user. As such, iterative
process is the recommended big data implementation strategy for the business.
Step 2: balance the skills and budgets available for big data. It may be quite a challenge to
predict the budget requirements of big data project. As such, Bunnings should have a clear
understanding of the expected benefits and cost of implementing big data and secure sufficient

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budget. Additionally, it is important to have the right skill set for the implementation of big data.
The personnel who have sufficient expertise, knowledge, and skills required to successfully
implement and maintain big data solution. As such, the company requires carry out staff
augmentation in order to accommodate the new technology. The company has to set aside
enough budget so as to enable successful implementation of big data solution. Additionally,
necessary training should be done for the employees so as to allow them acquire necessary data
science skills or planning and designing, cluster/parallel computer skills, and NoSQL and
Hadoop skills.
Step 3: identify the risks associated with big data implementation. Every business should be able
to determine the amount of risks that it can handle by implementing big data solution. Bunnings
being a highly competitive business should be willing extra risks on market innovations that have
the potential to bring more benefits in the long run. However, it is necessary to understand the
dynamics of the business before embarking on big data project. It is equally important for the
business to take extra caution when implementing big data because it may come with dire risks.
The acculturation and development of new technology solutions is often fraught with challenges
and failures.
Step 4: define your big data road map or implementation plan. The road map will help the
business to start preparing and adjusting to the change that may be brought about through big
data implementation. Figure 1 below give more details on the implementation road map.

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Figure 1: Implementation Road Map
(Source: You, Ogiela and Hwang, 2015)
Bunnings having some experience with business intelligence analytics and application, has, high
capacity operations and requirements and a more mature practices of data management.
However, this does not that risks are reduced or success is guaranteed. The following are some of
the tips that should be contemplated by Bunnings when implementing big data:
Hire a consultant: the business should not be reluctant in getting help through hiring an expert as
consultant. It is important to ensure they have sufficient knowledge and experience when dealing
with big data. This will go way to help the business to identify the various challenges and
benefits of implementing big data solution.
Carry out training: the company should organize training workshop for the employees so as to
increase their knowledge concerning the new technology that the business is planning to adopt.
Additionally, the company can buy books, or pay for online classes for the employees.

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Experiment and set expectations: when implementing a new technology or business solution it is
recommended that it is important to plan to fail. This will enable the business to prepare for the
unexpected. Furthermore, it is necessary to clearly define the business expectation from
implementing the solution because they determine if the project will succeed or fail.
Bunnings Hardware should try and look at the project from all the angles and dimensions.
Sometimes the project may have been completed successfully within budget and on time, but it
will be of little benefits if the end users are not trained. As such, the business should consider all
the above steps so as to successfully implement the big data solution.
Information and sources
Business and organizations are continually adopting big data solution for the sole purpose of
analytics to identify new opportunities and strategies. But before the business starts extracting
valuable information and insights from big data, it should be able to identify the various big data
sources. Data exist in different forms and is massive and if it is not sourced of classified well it
can lead to the organization wasting resources and precious time. It is important for the business
to have the knowledge to sift through the different sources of data and classify them accordingly
based on relevance and usability (Bornakke and Due, 2018). The following are some of the
sources of big data:
Media: this is the most common big data source because it offers valuable information
concerning the changing trends and preferences of the customer. This is the fastest means that
the business can get vast amount of in-depth data concerning its target audience because it is
self-broadcasted and crosses all demographical and physical barriers making it possible for the
business to draw conclusion and patterns to improve their decision making. Some of the
examples of media sources include Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, YouTube, and other
generic media such as videos, images, podcasts, and audios that give qualitative and quantitative
insights regarding consumer interaction.
Cloud: many businesses have moved their data storage platform to the cloud environment from
the traditional databases. This is because the cloud has the ability to accommodate unstructured
and structured data giving the business on-demand insights and real-time information
(Chakraborty and Gonnade, 2014). One thing that makes the cloud a good source of big data is

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its properties of scalability and flexibility and the ability to source and store data on both private
and public clouds making it an economical and efficient source of data.
Web: one of the biggest source of data is the internet because of its easy accessibility and is
widespread. This is the cheapest data that Bunnings Hardware can source its data concerning its
target audience. Some of the web services such as Wikipedia provides quick and free
information to everyone (Erraissi, Belangour and Tragha, 2018). The web can be such a great
source because of its enormity because business do not need to wait to grow their own big data
repositories and infrastructure.
Internet of Things (IoT): data or content generated from machines from IoT makes up valuable
and resourceful source of big data. Such data is commonly collected from sensors connected to
electronic components.
Big data technologies
Data management in big data is very important to any business because of the data influx and
allowing the company to make more informed and smarter decision. Big data can really enable
the business to come up with new strategies and opportunities to boost business productivity and
operations (Aggarwal and Sonika, 2016). Because of the huge amount of data, there is need have
technologies in place to handle the massive data. Big data can be too large for the traditional
technologies to handle thus the need to have more advanced technologies to handle the massive.
There is need to have these technologies so as to reveal trends and patterns, thus helping the
business and marketing campaigns. The following are some of the technologies that can be
employed by Bunnings Hardware:
Kafka
This technology has the ability to handle data streams in real time and efficiently and is a great
tool for integrating different systems such as NiFi, Spark, and other third party tools. It is an
open source, is fault tolerant, safer option, horizontally scalable, and extremely fast (Pääkkönen
and Pakkala, 2015). Kafka is a distributed system, thus stores data in categories and topics which
is replicated across the different stations. This technology has been adopted by several
companies in handling and processing their big data.

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Cloud Dataflow
This is a big data technology from Google that has been integrated with simple models of
programming for streaming and batch data processing. This tool enables the business to do away
with worries concerning operational activities such as resource management and performance
optimization (Oussous, et al., 2018). It also allows dynamically allocate resources to minimize
latency while maintaining high utilization.
Apache Samza
This is an extension of Kafka technology and integrates advanced features like Simple API,
Processor Isolation, Extensible, fault tolerance, scalability, and durable messaging. This is a
reliable big data technology because of its advanced big data processing capabilities.
It is important for Bunnings to note that the ecosystem of big data keeps evolving and new big
data technologies emerge regularly (Bayliss, 2016). As such, the company should be ready to
upgrade to such new technologies to ensure that they are up to date on the most reliable ad
advanced big data technologies.
Big Data Visualization
Data visualization in big data refers to the concept or representing the data visually using graphs,
histograms, fever charts, among other complex representations to enable the business to
determine unexpected patterns and correlations in the data and make more informed decisions
(Qin, Luo, Tang and Li, 2018). There are several big data visualization tools. They include:
Tableau
This is one of the most popular data visualization tool for businesses and corporate
organizations. It enables one to create graphs, charts, maps and other graphical representation
(Shneiderman, 2014). The figure below shows how tableau:

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Figure 2: Tableau
(Source: Shmueli, 2017)
Infogram
Infograms is another commonly used data visualization tool. It lets one to link infographics and
visualizations to real time big data. This is a great benefit because the business can be able to get
visualization from big data in real time and make more informed decisions based on the current
data (Riahi and Riahi, 2018). It also supports account creation for teams such as journalists and
media publishers. The figure below shows infogram interface: