HI5019 Group Assignment: Strategic Information Systems Case Study

This case study analyzes the strategic information systems needs of Friendly Supermarket, a supermarket chain facing declining sales. The assignment explores the implementation of Business Intelligence (BI) tools to improve business objectives. It details the supermarket's business processes, identifies major control risks, and outlines system requirements for BI integration. The study examines BI features and functionalities, software selection (Logi Analytics, Sisense, and Microsoft Power BI), vendor comparison, and recommendations for the most suitable BI solution. The report emphasizes how BI can generate reports, provide executive dashboards, support data analysis, and enable the supermarket to make data-driven decisions. The study highlights the importance of understanding customer behavior, improving sales, and implementing strategic plans for the supermarket's success. The case study recommends specific BI software packages and vendors to enhance the supermarket's operations, boost customer satisfaction, and increase profitability. The report also includes references to relevant research and literature on the topic.

Running head: STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Strategic Information Systems for Business and Enterprise
Name of Student-
Name of University-
Author’s Note-

1STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
Abstract
Transforming the business data to business insights is known as business intelligence and
Friendly Supermarket needs to implement BI in its working process so that they can improve
their business objective and increase their sales percent. BI includes software packages and
includes services that helps in transforming data in actionable form enhancing business to take
decisions. BI includes technologies, collection practices, business applications and integration
analysis for the business along with business information. The main purpose of business
intelligence is supporting the decision making of the business. BI systems are mainly data driven
that helps to make decision for the company. As Friendly Supermarket is facing loss in its sales,
the company needs to organize the data and make strategic plans to improve the objective of the
business. So, the company needs to implement BI tools in the present system. This report
explains the details of BI tools that Friendly Supermarket can use and states three BI vendors that
would help to business to increase its profit percent and recommend the best BI software
packages that are offered by software vendors. The importance of implementing BI solution in
the organization is explained in this report.

2STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Business Requirements....................................................................................................................3
Business processes of Friendly Supermarket..............................................................................4
Major control risk for business process.......................................................................................5
System Requirements......................................................................................................................6
BI features and functionalities.....................................................................................................6
Software Selection...........................................................................................................................7
Vendor Selection.............................................................................................................................9
Comparison of BI software packages..........................................................................................9
Most suitable vendor and BI software packages.......................................................................10
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................11
Recommendation...........................................................................................................................11
References......................................................................................................................................14

3STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
Introduction
Business Intelligence (BI) includes group of processes, technologies as well as
architectures that helps in converting raw data to some meaningful information. BI helps to drive
profitable business actions in which they are implemented. BI includes a number of software as
well as services that helps in transforming data in some actionable intelligence as well as
knowledge. BI when used in businesses states the strategy of the organization and includes
tactical as well as operational business (Maffock, Wamba and Kamdjoug 2019). BI supports
decision making with the use of historical data instead of taking assumptions. The tool that is
used in business intelligence helps to perform data analysis and helps in creating reports, graphs,
charts, dashboards and provide the users with intelligence that the business is having.
This report include the case study of Friendly Supermarket that is situated in Queensland.
This includes a supermarket chain and is conducting business for over 25 years. This
supermarket has 8 supermarkets spread all over the region. The company is experiencing a
decline with its sales and is not having profit over three years. So, to improve the working
process of the business, Business intelligence is to be included in the company that would help to
improve the business processes. This report explains the business requirements in Friendly
Supermarket and includes system requirements. This report also includes software selection
method that Friendly supermarket should include to improve business and also includes a
comparison between the vendor selections that are chosen for the supermarket chain.
Business Requirements

4STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
Business processes of Friendly Supermarket
As the supermarket is large and involve many component entities from having repeated
customers, 8 different retail stores, different transportation systems, different warehouses at
different places, and number of suppliers who provide supplies to Friendly Supermarket.
As the supermarket is facing increased competitive environment, this supermarket acts as
an intermediary between the customers who buy products and the dispersed suppliers
(Schlesinger, and Rahman 2016). To carry out this activity, the supermarkets includes assorts
good number of individual suppliers and helps to organize as well as distributes all those
supplies to different retail stores so that the customers can buy the products.
Friendly Supermarket being one of the largest chain of supermarket over the region also
needs to maintain a large number of stock and also has to handle the stock from the suppliers to
the customers. The supermarket also need to maintain the types of product along with number of
stores as well as includes the warehouses with their sizes.
Friendly Supermarket carries out its sales only at retails stores and does not have any
online facilities for the customers. They also do not have home delivery service for their
customers as because their business for not include any BI tools to organize the data. In this fast
paced life, it is much needed to satisfy the need of customers (Shaban, Bikkulova and Klimin
2019). The customers mostly prefers to have online buying and wants the service of the home
delivery from the supermarkets. Business intelligence is needed to enhance the customer buying
experience and include selling experience in their working system.
To study the customer behavior, it is much needed to gather all historic data of the
company related to sales, and measure those data and makes report with those data (Olszak

5STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
2016). Friendly Supermarket does not study the customer needs and study their past sales report
and does jot implement any strategy to improve their business objectives.
Major control risk for business process
Friendly Supermarket lagged behind compared to other stores in that region. All the
processes are carried out in the working process does not includes new technologies that are used
by other industries (Maffock, Wamba and Kamdjoug 2019). As the organization does not study
its current sales report and does not have any idea about the need of the customers. Friendly
Supermarket also do not have the capacity to change their plans to action and they do not have
proper gathering of data and is not capable of generating graphs or reports from its historical
data.
Understanding the client purchasing behavior is one of the main process that helps to
upgrade the working system (Valdez et al. 2017). For upgrading their income and their
execution, the organization should know the origin of the customers and should include retail
mobility system so that they can serve their customers in a better way. Implementing all features
of business intelligence along with data management services helps to expertise the analytics and
helps to modify the data integration system (Sun, Sun and Strang 2018). The business that
Friendly Supermarket has been following has made their consumers price sensitive, shortage of
time and includes convenience driven.
Without implementation of business intelligence in the system, Friendly Supermarket is
not capable of making smart decision making regarding its sales and expenditure in the business.
Friendly Supermarket is unstructured and does not analyze insight and might risk to closing
down its retail stores as there is a lack of business intelligence in the system that other retail
shops are following (Fischer 2018). They also cannot have in depth analysis of the sales to

6STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
evaluate their sales and also cannot boost their performances. Without BI, Friendly Supermarket
cannot have specific business goals and thus they cannot have any marketing goals in their
organization. Friendly Supermarket also cannot have customer knowledge and do not know
about the needs of the customer. In this way they might lose customer to other retail stores
valuing customer needs.
System Requirements
BI features and functionalities
The functionalities and features that are included by BI that can improve the business
objective of Friendly Supermarket are
1. Ranking Reports: The organization will be capable of generating reports from the
historical data (Balachandran and Prasad 2017). They can view the best performing facets of the
business and also the vice versa. This can also help in developing products for market campaign.
2. BI helps to run what if analysis regarding to a decision taken for the company. If the
management does not know what might be the result of a decision taken to improve business
objective, they can use business intelligence tools.
3. BI provides executive dashboards that would help the leaders of the company to get a
real time overview for the business. These are in the form of graphs and charts and helps to
summaries all other reports generated by BI.
4. BI includes interactive reports that allows the users to have massive amount of data
that generates wide amount of possible views (Moscoso et al. 2016). The users can take
advantages such as including statistical analysis and includes regression for identifying the
trends.

7STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
5. Business intelligence helps to provide the executive generating a detailed summary of
daily processes or events that takes place in the organization and provide them with information
that would help to take decision to improve business objective.
6. BI provide pivot tables that includes significant features that includes large data sets.
The pivot tables can include calculations that includes sorting, counting the data that are already
being stored and helps to summarize the results.
7. BI can also create ad-hoc reports and that can be generated without any IT experts. The
nontechnical users might generate their own report using the BI tools that are provided by the BI
vendors.
8. The BI tool that will be used in Friendly Supermarket will restrict certain users to
access particular data sets (Stefanovic and Milosevic 2017). They can also restricts the usage of
applications to certain individuals or to user who are not allowed to use them.
9. The platforms that are provided by BI will help Friendly Supermarket to access its own
data along with data from that are from social media, websites or email. The BI tool is an open
integration that would allow Friendly Supermarket to enhance the business objectives.
Software Selection
Logi Analytics: This is a leading embedded platform for analytics. This vendor has been
serving its customer for 17 years by embedding dashboards as well as generating reports for the
commercials as well as for enterprise applications (Bach, Čeljo and Zoroja 2016). By
implementing the application the developers can take complete control as well as includes
functionality in the system. This helps to match the analytics with rest of the application with
custom (Nerkar 2016). Logi analytics provides adaptive security so that they can embed in the

8STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
application. This is the only solution for analytics that is designed for embedding machine
learning and includes artificial intelligence that is inside the application. It is not needed to know
statistical modelling or python to use Logi analytics.
Logi Analytics price starts from $16000 each year. There is also a free version that is
provided by Logi Analytics.
Sisense: Sisense is the first API cloud technology that helps to mix up the data as well as
helps to create other analytic applications. This BI software can be embedded anywhere. This
software includes drive change and helps in building the business with self-service that helps to
leverage the data of the organization. This vendor is based jointly in New York, Tel Aviv and
NY and includes innovative hardware that helps to increase the agile market for BI (Larson and
Chang 2016). The company has invented in chip technology that mainly utilizes the CPU areas
of the microchips so that the data can be processed ten times fast compared to memory parsing.
This company is including innovations in its BI solution such as developing IoT, implementing
AI and including machine learning.
The pricing for Sisense is mainly offered to its customer by its quote basis. This vendor
services its customer with annual pricing which is most scalable and divides caters companies
with different shapes as well as includes sizes (Drake and Walz 2018). On request from the
customers there are specific rates. The price is fixed as per the size of the company and helps to
scale the operations of the organization.
Microsoft: The power BI helps to provide different functions of data processing. The BI
Microsoft tools includes many other BI tools and includes tools that can be used as SQL server.
The tools of Microsoft supports extraction as well as data assimilation that helps to create viable

9STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
business intelligence. Share point is also provided by Microsoft that helps to build collaborative
workflows (Kasemsap 2018). This helps to identify as well as helps to retain files that are
valuable and can be transferred with BI software so that it can be chosen.
Azure is another package that is offered by Microsoft which helps to streamline the data
movement through process of Microsoft based software (Atriwal et al. 2016). This system is
highly versatile and has the ability for constructing the applications in cloud fashion. The pricing
for Microsoft BI is 9.99 per month. This also provides a free subscription per month.
Vendor Selection
Comparison of BI software packages
Comparison between Zoho Analytics and Microsoft is explained below
Zoho Analytics: This software package includes elf service business intelligence as well
as include analytics platform. The BI software package provided by the company is $25 per
month along with free plan and for payment, no credit card is required. The top features that are
provided by the company includes that they do not need any downloads or installation process.
There is also a web based access from applications, databases and spreadsheets (Mishra 2018).
The customers who take service from Zoho analytics are freelancers, large and mod sized
organizations, non-profit customers, small business as well as public administrations. The
supports that this software provides its customers is FAQs, video tutorials, support from phone,
forum, knowledge base, as well as provides online support.
Microsoft power business intelligence includes BI visualization as well as includes
reporting for the desktop, mobile access and web access (Murugesan and Karthikeyan 2016).
The price that Power BI offers is $9.99 per month with free plan and does not include credit card

10STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
for payment. The features that is provided by Microsoft is live sharing reports and live
dashboards. There are also data driven alerts that includes mobile insights and helps to create
live, data metric dashboards with real time. Mainly large sized enterprise and mid-sized
enterprise uses the services of Microsoft (Mashingaidze and Backhouse 2017). Supporting
material provided by the Microsoft BI is FAQs, video tutorials, online support, knowledge based
programs, and forum questions.
Most suitable vendor and BI software packages
The most suitable software vendor that is recommended for Friendly Supermarket is
Microsoft Power BI. This includes stack power BI that includes PAT list with combination of
analytical capabilities, supporting wide ranging data and includes affordable pricing. Data
support includes SAP, MySQL, JSON and many more (Khan 2018). This vendor also provides
the software packages at affordable pricing. The software packages provides personalized
dashboards with some unique 360 degree view for their business (Gálvez et al. 2018). Recent
update for the power BI features provides platform for creating as well as managing the in house
report of Friendly Supermarket. This is mainly done via local servers and includes unavoidable
cloud storage.
The best software package for Friendly Supermarket is Sisense software package. This is
a business analytics software that helps to combine all data directly from the SaaS products and
includes database analytics each year (Villegas-Ch, Luján-Mora and Buenaño-Fernandez 2018).
This software package not only offers software systems, but also includes different data sets,
customized dashboards, have data visualizations, and also allows the users to share those data.
This BI solution helps to unify the data in centralized location without using hardware from the
IT departments (Dubey and Sharan 2017). The data visualization features include different

11STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
widgets including line charts so that the trends can be determined and also includes pie charts to
having clear findings. This software package includes advanced monitoring capabilities that are
crucial including the business data real time and includes information that gets reflected on the
dashboard (Lopez, Segura and Santórum 2019). Sisense provides collaboration of tools that
allows report accessing along with proper monitoring and sharing of the dashboards that helps
the users to download the file and analyze it.
Conclusion
The BI software helps to connect people with all the information that are needed for the
organization and how the organization will be include BI in its working process. The software
that is included in the Friendly Supermarket helps to increase the capabilities of the company and
those capabilities can be provided in spreadsheets that delivers a picture of the business. Friendly
Supermarket can use the application of BI by making different periodic reports and includes
enterprise events that are needed for the company. The report that are generated using BI helps to
create periodic reports and are reactive for the enterprise agents.
The report explains the key processes that are carried out in Friendly Supermarket and
also the control risks are explained in the business process in the company. There are many
features of BI that helps and organization to improve its business objectives and this report
explains some of the features of as well as functionalities of BI that is to be implemented in
Friendly Supermarket to improve the business functionalities. The best BI software package for
Friendly Supermarket is also explained in this report stating its importance and functionality that
the company will need to enhance its business objectives.
Recommendation

12STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
1. It is recommended that the business intelligence should be first used by the IT
department for managing the IT business. It can be started by reading the business publications
for developing broader understanding as well as includes proper business perspective. A
relationship is to be cultivated with the business counterparts.
2. It is recommended to Friendly Supermarket to include adoption of technology but all
organization should address the standardization as well as governance. Organizations are now a
days proliferating to use overlapping BI tools that helps to grow continuously. As the budgets
gets shifted away from IT and use the BI tool. But that is not recommended. Standardization and
governance should be followed.
3. With mainstream technologies, it is most important to find niche areas that includes
great value. It is recommended to value all these technologies and generalize those with norms.
The technologies that are used are to be related with the implementation of BI tools.
4. Developing scenarios as well as preparing black swan effect is generally recommended
to Friendly Supermarket. There are many areas which includes data mining, predictive analytics
as well as inferential statistics cannot be predicted in the company. There are large number of
historical data in an organization and situation might come where the data might become
unpredictable. It is recommended to develop scenarios and helps to prepare those to improve
business functionalities.
5. It is also recommended to include collaboration start with the buildings and includes
sustaining collaborative culture within the organization. The employees working in the company
should be motivated so that they can share information. Otherwise the best technology would
also not help.

13STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
6. Friendly Supermarket should undertake operationalizing BI solution as because they
are part of broader management system that can be initiated. With the use of BI, the organization
will be able to identify the reduced sales in the company. They need to operationalize the tool of
BI.

14STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE
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