You are a business technology office McKinsey consultant and you have just been
ID: 3696396 • Letter: Y
Question
You are a business technology office McKinsey consultant and you have just been contracted by Nike. The Nike CTO calls you and tells you that because of the financial crisis they need to cut costs and raise profitability. They would like to know how their sales are doing, by shops, regions and product categories, this year compared to last year (and they have prepared a list of such questions they would like the system to be capable of on a regular basis). They have a IBM DB2 DBMS distributed server where all the operations are registered in real-time, storing the last 6 months data, and when they tested it for such purposes it didn’t go that well. The rest of the data until 5 years ago is stored on magnetic band in an old CIA base.
1. How would you catalogue the system they have? What is it? Is it a DW?
2. Why is the system they have not fit for such queries? (What are the problems that could arise if that system were used for that?)
3. What would you suggest they do? What (if any) should they buy (HW and SW)? How much does that cost (just approximate)?
4. Recently they have conducted a marketing campaign for Europe and USA for “running shoes”. Could you tell with the system you build if the campaign was successful or not? What would be the questions the system should answer to obtain this information?
Explanation / Answer
Business intelligence provides data at the moment of value to a company.With quick access to your internal data, you can more efficiently use your time to analyze internal information and make decisions
A strong BI system, if well-configured, can help eliminate the time spent copying and pasting data and performing calculationsbecause with business intelligence software, workers can quickly "generate reports where most of the leg work has already been performed behind the scenes
BI software investment can pay for itself over and over by helping decision-makers identify areas for cost savings.
Cutting excessive inventory -- and thereby the cost to maintain it -- is one of the easiest changes a company can make to immediately affect its bottom line.
BI solution with a good dashboard, "that provides retailers better visibility into inventory, enables them to make better decisions about what to order and when so goods don't sit idly on warehouse shelves
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