Business Intelligence Applications in Retail Business: OLAP, Data Mining & Reporting Services

Abstract

As a result of today's competitive business environment, companies have been trying to improve the utilization of funds effectively in their budgets for information technology investments. These companies retrieve more information with the same set of resources by means of business intelligence methods. According to Rubin (Chabrow, 2004) IT budgets are not simply declining or levelling off, rather, companies are shifting from a pure cost-cut mode to a model that emphasises agility and efficiency. Tremendous daily growth of the company data requires more funds and investment for establishing the technologies and infrastructure necessary for gathering fast and crucial information that supports the decision making process. This necessity gave birth to various business intelligence methods, which mainly aim to process mass amount of collected data from their existing application, and represent it in a way with which companies can apply to their daily competitive decisions. This application primarily concerns the implementation of business intelligence for a retail business company. The aim is to implement built-in business intelligence solutions of the Microsoft SQL Server that holds the commercial information of the company for the past three years. The customer company has already been using Microsoft products. The key items used for analyzing data are sales, momentary inventory and logistics information. The application can be grouped in five main areas: Building the data warehouse, constructing OLAP cubes, applying data mining algorithms on OLAP cubes, representing the results in reports with reporting services, and implementation.