Academic Integrity: tutoring, explanations, and feedback — we don’t complete graded work or submit on a student’s behalf.

1) how did Ben & Jerry’s use business intelligence tools to remain successful an

ID: 3754308 • Letter: 1

Question


1) how did Ben & Jerry’s use business intelligence tools to remain successful and competitive? 2) why was information cleaning critical to California Pizza? 3) why was 100% accurate & complete information impossible for Noodles & Company? er Eight Case: Mining the Data Warehouse According to a Merrill lynch survey in 2006, business intelligen e e were at the top of CIOs' technology spending list. Following are are using data warehousing and data-mining tools to gain valuable data-mining tools ence software and examples n Ben & Jerry's These days, when we all scream for ice cream, Ben & Jerry's cuts throug grated query, reporting, and online analytical processing technology from Bi otw ness Objects. Through an Oracle database and with BI from Business Objects, be the din by using inte- Ben & Jerry's tracks a complaint, the consumer affairs staff r whatever did not meet the organiza- the ingredients and life of each pint. If a consumer calls in with matches the pint with which supplier's milk, eggs, cherries, o tion's near-obsession with quality 8 The BI tools let Ben & Jerry's offials access, analyze, and act on customer information collected by the sales, finance, purchasing, and quality-assurance departments. The company can determine what milk customers prefer in the making of the ice cream. The technology helped Ben & Jerry's track more than 12,500 consumer contacts in 2005. The information ranged from comments about the ingredients used in ice cream to queries about social causes supported by the company. 9

Explanation / Answer

1. Ben & Jerry's aced the cut throat competition by using data-warehousing and data-mining tools to gain valuable business intelligence. Through BI, integrated querying, reporting and online analytical peocessing was enabled which further helped Ben & Jerry's to track the ingredients and life of each pint. Every customer complaint was handled with proper care and the ingredient which did not meet quality requirements was flagged. Moreover, the BI tools further helped to analyze and act on customer data. This data had a vast scope and hence proper information from this was highly beneficial to Ben & Jerry's.

2.California Pizza was a well eatablished food chain. It had a loyal customer base. Hence, it was expected from the organization to review the customer complaints and take care of customer needs. Before using Business Intelligence, the team had to maintain all its financial data and line items data in spreadsheets. Maintaining spreadsheets are quite tiresome as data needs to be entered manually and relations need to be defiend by users. Thus a lot of time was spent on entering data and making it readable rather than actually analyzing the data. With the BI tool, Cognos, lots of time was saved on entering data and making it meaningful. Now, the maximum time could be spent on reviewing the data which would further help the company to understand customer problems and in the process grow and spread quickly.

3.Before using the BI tool Cognos, the report requests from customers were to be collected manually by the IT and finance professionals. These requests spanned across various domains. Now, analyzing large quantities of data manually and without deriving any relation among them would never produce 100 percent accurate and reliable results. Hence, Cognos was implemented which helped implement reporting standards and real-time operational information to field management. Cognos provides each user the complete view of the business and consistent reporting throughout the business. The company can now analyze patterns in the data to leverage new business opportunities. Hence, the reilability of the information gathered was way better than manual reporting and henceforth Noodles & Company users benefited greatly from flexible querying and reporting.