BIT355: Business Intelligence - Case Study Analysis & Value Creation

This report provides an analysis of seven business intelligence case studies to understand how BI tools, methods, and techniques create business value. Each case study is examined to identify the types of problems and decisions businesses faced, how BI addressed these issues and supported decision-making, and the specific tools and techniques used to add value. The case studies cover various industries and applications of BI, including pricing strategies in supermarkets, location analysis for marketing, improving elevator efficiency, tracking business performance in retail, enhancing maintenance decision-making in the air force, determining the success of overseas assignments, and managing inventory in the pharmaceutical industry. The analysis highlights the diverse ways in which BI can be leveraged to solve business problems and improve overall performance.

Business Intelligence
Part A

Table of Contents
1. Introduction.............................................................................................................................................................. 1
Case Study 1: Giant Food Stores Prices the Entire Store............................................................................................1
Case Study 2: Location, Location, Location...............................................................................................................1
Case Study 3: Making Elevators Go Faster!..............................................................................................................2
Case Study 4: Pacific Sunwear Tracks Business Performance....................................................................................2
Case Study 5: Improving Maintenance Decision Making in the Finnish Air Force through Simulation.......................2
Case Study 6: IAP Systems’ Intelligent DSS Determines the Success of Overseas Assignments and Learns from the
Experience................................................................................................................................................................ 3
Case Study 7: A DSS for managing Inventory at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).................................................................3
References........................................................................................................................................................................ 4

1. Introduction
This report represents seven case studies, to understand the business value with the help
of BI (Business Intelligence) tools, methods and techniques. All the seven case studies will be
analyzed and the types of problems and evaluated decision will be summarized; how the BI tool
addressed the business issues will be discussed and the used BI tool, methods and techniques to
add value to the business will be identified.
Case Study 1: Giant Food Stores Prices the Entire Store
The Giant Food Stores is a supermarket chain, which followed a narrow Every Day Low
Price strategy on most of its products and old promotion system that failed to keep up with the
pricing decisions, which a fast paced grocery market requires. It limited the execution of
sophisticated pricing strategies. Moreover, the pricing rules were not documented. The company
even had no means to forecasting the impact of the rule changes, before the prices hit the store
shelves. Then, the decision of deploying a system to take care of the pricing decisions were
made.
The number of patients coming to the clinic and their location in the five mile radius.
PersonicX is used to determine the well represented clusters for urgent care clinic database and
provide highest ROI.
The data base of the clinic and the PersonicX software's geospatial analysis capability
were used to find the clinic's location where 80 percentage of clinic's patient lived, where
marketing was concentrated within 5 mile radius, to add value to the business.
Case Study 2: Location, Location, Location
This case refers to a marketing intelligence firm, which faced increased competition and
required deciding whether to change its location or change its marketing practices to increase its
income. Acxiom's PersonicX system was decided to use which concentrated to locate the areas of
the clinic’s target audience.
Business Intelligence here includes the distraction strategy which was used to resolve the
problem of waiting time. However, instead of adding a new elevator only the full length mirrors
were added.
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Here, the distraction technique is used for the second case study, where instead of adding
a new elevator, only the full length mirrors were added which costs comparatively very less. The
proposed solution and the cost has huge difference.
Case Study 3: Making Elevators Go Faster!
This case study refers to an elevator, which denotes the problem of managing complaints
related to the slow elevators in a tall hotel tower, which required a lot of waiting time. To resolve
this problem, it was decided to install a full length mirrors on the doors of the elevator on each
floor. This resulted to distract the men by looking at women and the women to look at
themselves for adjustments.
Case Study 4: Pacific Sunwear Tracks Business Performance
This case study refers to, Pacific Sunware’s problem, where the retailer offering casual
fashion styles wanted a system that can help in determining the styles, colors and sizes, which
are sold in respective stores, for helping in the purchase decisions of inventory.
The BI reporting platform helped to track the store and the performance of the product.
On the other hand, it helps to take better decisions related to managing the store, its operations,
planning, merchandizing etc.
So, Pacific Sunwear, built Netezza data warehouse and utilized MicroStrategy's BI
reporting platform, which helped in tracking the store and the performance of the product.
Additionally, it helps to take better decisions related to managing the store, its operations,
planning, merchandizing etc., which adds value to the business.
Case Study 5: Improving Maintenance Decision Making in the Finnish Air Force through
Simulation
The Finnish Air force lacked efficient maintenance system, to maintain aircrafts for the
purpose of missions, training and for various other tasks.
For Finnish Air force, the maintenance program is divided into three levels like
organizational level, intermediate level and depot-level. The event simulation program was used
for accommodating the problems related to task times, workforce problems, handling material
delays and failure of equipment.
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The simulation model is implemented with the help of Arena software which uses the
GUI (Graphical user interface) and (Visual Basic for applications) VBA.
Case Study 6: IAP Systems’ Intelligent DSS Determines the Success of Overseas
Assignments and Learns from the Experience.
In a firm, a problem was encountered, which results in loss of $250, 000, every year. The
manager's issues are related to the overseas assignments, which refers to predicting whether a
particular assignment is a good or a bad experience for the managers and their family (Turban,
Sharda and Delen, 2011). The Neural technologies for preventing fraud, and Minotaur was
installed to decline the fraud and loss.
Additionally, IAP provides better preparation of transfer, reduction in compromised
assignments etc., and every year it saves millions of dollar for the large organization (Turban,
Sharda and Delen, 2011).
The intelligent DSS helps in determining the success of the overseas assignments.
Case Study 7: A DSS for managing Inventory at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
A global pharmaceutical company named GSK is considered, which sells various
products related to oral health, nutritional drinks and so on. The demand of the competitive retail
market has lead the company to face problems in maintain the quantity of the products, to ensure
high level of service, for the customers. This problem has occurred due to excess inventory cost,
thus it needs an optimal inventory policy to accomplish decent profit.
The steps it took includes, rom supply chain planning system, it gathered all its sales
information, demand information, month-end inventory information, production and lead time
information. Next, it developed a model, for estimating the safety stock, with the provided
inputs.
The spread-sheet tool (Microsoft excel) was utilized for building the model.
The company was able to evaluate this depending on the, excel based DSS. Thus, it has
helped the managers of the company, to take inventory decisions (Turban, Sharda and Delen,
2011).
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References
Turban, E., Sharda, R. and Delen, D. (2011). Decision support and business intelligence systems.
9th ed.
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