University Name: Business Intelligence Report - MIST360

This report delves into the strategic application of Business Intelligence (BI) within a retail company that specializes in soft furnishing products. It examines how BI solutions can be aligned with the overall organizational strategy, emphasizing areas like merchandise and customer intelligence, as well as operational and competitive insights. The report highlights the value creation that BI brings to organizations, particularly in enhancing decision-making, strategizing innovation, and improving product quality while reducing costs. Furthermore, it explores how BI can be utilized to strategically support and maintain a competitive advantage, focusing on business planning and providing the organization with a competitive edge. The report concludes by summarizing the advantages of BI for the retail sector, specifically highlighting its role in providing insightful data-driven decision-making and supporting competitive advantage within the industry. The report also includes references to support the findings.

Running head: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Topic: IS Strategy, Management, and Acquisition
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
How BI solutions can be aligned with overall strategy for the organisation.........................2
BI value creation for organisations........................................................................................4
How BI can be utilised as a vehicle in strategically supporting maintaining a competitive
advantage for the organisation...............................................................................................6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
The latest business era has been keen on transforming itself with all the latest
strategies that it can utilize in the daily activities. For this reason, business organizations have
been looking out for adding value to the business by exploiting the Information Systems and
Information Technology or IS/IT (Williams 2016). Using IS/IT for adding value to the
business has brought about the focus to Business Intelligence or BI which has gained a lot of
popularity in the business aspects. BI provides numerous advantages to a business given their
ability to provide insights to a business and direct them towards acquiring appropriate
business strategies to the organization and its business. This is why, the below report would
focus on the business solutions provided by BI focusing on a retail company that mostly sells
soft furnishing products.
How BI solutions can be aligned with overall strategy for the organisation
The retail industry was amongst the very last industries to accept the benefits that the
implementation of new technologies provided or contributed in a business. This is true when
it comes into accepting BI in the operational strategy for the organization. There have been
other industries that have gained the level of supreme sophistication with the utilization of the
BI solutions and retail industry was lagging behind (Mishra et al. 2016). Therefore, the
solutions that BI provides the organizations need to be identified so as to align them with the
business ideals. This would provide the organization with having a proper insight about the
organization and implement proper strategies as per the acquired knowledge through the BI
systems.
Ever since competition has increased at an alarming rate in the retail industry, they
have also been adopting the BI software. In this particular case, the BI solutions are to be

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used for a retail organization, focusing on the selling of soft furniture equipment (Sarangi
2016). Following are the zones of implementation where BI solutions provide numerous
advantages in case of a retail industry focusing on the selling of Soft Furniture equipment:
Merchandise Intelligence: The implementation of BI solutions is found to be
especially beneficial when it happens to be included in the zones concerning the merchandise
intelligence (Banerjee and Mishra 2017). BI is extremely beneficial when it comes to the
merchandize intelligence since it would provide appropriate solution in sorting out the
various aspects of merchandise intelligence including the planning of the merchandise,
assortment of the merchandizes and managing their space, size, promotion, price and even
identify the optimization of the merchandises for marking them down.
Customer Intelligence: This is another feature of BI that retail industry can benefit a
lot from. Customer is primary in any kind of business, but for retail industry, the primary
objective is to satisfy the needs of the customers and drag more and more potential customers
that the industry can provide. BI collects information about the customers within the industry
through the effective IS/IT implementation to collect all the general information that is
related in gathering the customer data (Kumar 2017). It not just provides information about
the customers currently associated with the organization but also looks out for the potential
customers utilizing the IS/IT technologies. With this data, it becomes easier for the
organization to keep a tab on the marketing automation, optimization of the marketing
divisions, and the optimization of the marketing with basket analysis.
Operational and competitive intelligence: Mostly BI deals with all kinds of
business information and helps the organization in categorizing them to formulate out a
proper decision that needs to be taken against the particular generated information. In case of
operational and competitive intelligence as well, BI solutions provides the retail organization

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to manage their IT portfolio, optimize the utilization of labour and select site if they are
thinking about an expansion (Chongwatpol 2017). On the other hand, the competitive
intelligence is gathered by the organization so that they can compare their business operations
with that of a competitor and implement appropriate business strategies accordingly.
BI value creation for organisations
BI has certain benefits that helps in bringing about a value within the business
organisation especially in this case where the business is from a detailed background trying to
setup in selling their products, which are the soft furniture equipment. BI offers this type of
business organisation to reach and effective decision through data driven ideas (Santoro et al.
2018). BI mostly facilitates the process of decision making, strategizing innovation within the
business, improve the quality of the products and at the same time reduce the cost for
providing superior quality products to the customers. The normal form of business
information that is generated everyday within a business organisation is transformed into
knowledge through the implementation of BI technique. BI transforms and converts the
generated information into effective knowledge that has an intention of providing analytical
information for the users, which in this case is the retail industry best business organisation
selling soft furniture equipment (Testa and Karpova 2018).
The main objective of BI is finding out the probable success rates that the company
can access from the data that is generated within the everyday operations in the business
system. There are several advantages of using BI since there are various benefits of this
particular technology implementation that helps in adding value to the information generated
(Lee 2017). Every information that is generated due to the customer involvement within the
organisational operation, the factors affecting the customer intelligence the merchandise
handling and information gathering and operational as well as competitive information is

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converted into required knowledge for the organisation to further analyse into. This is why BI
should be implemented within this particular organisation so that value is created by
converting the evaluated information into proper knowledge to be analysed within the
business and further more helping in making effective decision for the benefit of the
organisation.
BI adds other benefits as well. For instance it may be possible that the retail
organisation take help from a CRM system for operating the financial and operational
systems for the organisation. this is a part of BI system where each of these systems have
their own list of customer and with the help of a proper tool for BI it may be possible that all
these systems would have a consolidated information system to make sure that a business
user is provided with a full and true list of enterprise customers (Popovič, Puklavec and
Oliveira 2019). For this particular case this business users would not have to check various
other list from multiple sources. Therefore, it can be said that BI techniques provide data
leveraging from multiple sources with a diverse format and presenting into a consolidated
one.
Along with that, BI makes sure that the data is persistent, timed performance is
executed, flexibility is provided to the users with the proper analysis of the whole data
sources for efficient Human Resource Management.
How BI can be utilised as a vehicle in strategically supporting maintaining a
competitive advantage for the organisation
Business planning does not only become limited about maintaining a proper sale,
providing consistent service to the customers and following the course of the business
progression. Without a proper leadership within the business organisation it is impossible that

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and inform foresight is obtained by the organisation to understand the difference between the
past and current economics in the organisation. The industry market depends on BI so that
this retail organisation would have a little advantage over the competitors (Ustundag and
Cevikcan 2017). Since in the retail industry companies tend to grow up sooner and more in
number then they are expected, BI should be provided to the business organisation as a tool
so that they create a competitive advantages edge for the organisation.
BI utilizes various benefits to make sure that the business organisation taking up this
particular technique is at an advantageous position by providing them benefits for making the
business gain a competitive advantage over the contemporaries (Dingli, Marmara and
Fournier 2017).
These include providing a company white finances that are globally addressed and
made simpler, having information about the date today spending, monthly spending and early
spending within the organisation and provide effective measures to cut out all the wasteful
spending and for having a quicker and smarter process for decision making with the analysis
of all the business information that are to be found.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be said in conclusion that BI provides a wide range of advantage for
this particular retail organisation with focus on retail industry and the organisation belonging
to the retail business selling soft furniture equipment. This has been identified through the BI
solution that has been a line with the overall strategy that is taken for progression of the
operations within the organisation. it is found out about the ability of BI to create value
within the organisation and how it can be utilised as a particular vehicle that tries to
strategically support and maintain the competitive advantage within an organisation.

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References
Banerjee, M. and Mishra, M., 2017. Retail supply chain management practices in India: A
business intelligence perspective. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 34, pp.248-
259.
Chongwatpol, J., 2017, March. Toward Effective Marketing Strategies with Business
Intelligence. In Proceedings of NIDA International Business Conference 2017–Innovative
Management: Bridging(p. 151).
Dingli, A., Marmara, V. and Fournier, N.S., 2017. Comparison of Deep Learning Algorithms
to Predict Customer Churn within a Local Retail Industry. International Journal of Machine
Learning and Computing, 7(5).
Kumar, R., 2017. Journey of Business Intelligence. In Machine Learning and Cognition in
Enterprises (pp. 1-26). Apress, Berkeley, CA.
Lee, I. ed., 2017. The Internet of Things in the Modern Business Environment. IGI Global.
Mishra, B.K., Hazra, D., Tarannum, K. and Kumar, M., 2016, November. Business
intelligence using data mining techniques and business analytics. In 2016 International
Conference System Modeling & Advancement in Research Trends (SMART) (pp. 84-89).
IEEE.
Popovič, A., Puklavec, B. and Oliveira, T., 2019. Justifying business intelligence systems
adoption in SMEs: Impact of systems use on firm performance. Industrial Management &
Data Systems, 119(1), pp.210-228.

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Santoro, G., Fiano, F., Bertoldi, B. and Ciampi, F., 2018. Big data for business management
in the retail industry. Management Decision.
Sarangi, S., 2016. Business intelligence systems: A necessity for agile supply
chains. Parikalpana: KIIT Journal of Management, 12(2).
Testa, D.S. and Karpova, E., 2018. Academic Research Use in Strategic Decision-Making:
Barriers and Opportunities within the Apparel Retail Industry.
Ustundag, A. and Cevikcan, E., 2017. Industry 4.0: managing the digital transformation.
Springer.
Williams, S., 2016. Business intelligence strategy and Big Data analytics: a general
management perspective. Morgan Kaufmann.