Running head: WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Why Bealls Needs a Business Intelligence Solution David James BeallsFlorida

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Industry Vision and Strategy ........................................................................................................................ 4 Motivation and Problem ............................................................................................................................... 5 About SAP Lumira ....................................................................................................................................... 6 Centralizing Data ...................................................................................................................................... 7 Analyzing Data ......................................................................................................................................... 7 Sharing ...................................................................................................................................................... 8 Benefits of SAP Lumira ................................................................................................................................ 8 Cost and ROI............................................................................................................................................... 10 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 10 References ................................................................................................................................................... 12

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Executive Summary In the world of retail where Bealls competes, technological advances are constantly reshaping the landscape. Our company needs a new generation of tools to succeed in this dynamic industry. KPMGs survey confirms that traditional business models and customer segments can no longer be taken for granted (2013 Retail Industry Outlook Survey, 2013). Business Intelligence is a packaged solution that will take our company towards the future of the data-oriented market and will allow faster decisionmaking, customer behavior analysis, and market prediction.

With Business Intelligence tools, Bealls will be able to bridge the growing gap between IT and the retail business by providing real-time data, allowing our employees to obtain a clear view into business processes and operations. As a result, we can quickly understand what works well and also identify any issues regarding performance and efficiency. SAP Lumira is the best business intelligence solution to meet the data visualization and reporting requirements of our company in a cost-effective way.

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Industry Vision and Strategy Retail is one of the most diverse industries in the vertical industry arena. Retail enterprises encounter various challenges every day like managing customer expectations, choosing the right product to sell, selecting appropriate shipping options and suppliers, forecasting seasonal shift in demand, and managing inventory needs. These decisions are based on the enormous amounts of data generated from day to day

operations. Market trends in the retail industry change rapidly and retailers need to have complete insight into how actual results vary as compared to planned numbers, revenue by store, location, region, product line, and other factors. For a company to remain competitive in the retail industry, executives and managers need to have the ability to access and analyze complete information with insights about results and issues to support decisions and adapt to the changing market (Business Intelligence for Retail, 2013). Business Intelligence (BI) solutions help enterprises visualize this data in a concise and structured way as shown in Figure 1, which allows them to understand their consumer. The goal of BI is to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time and allows linking this insight to every decision that is made to better serve their customers ever changing needs and desires. Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm, has estimated that the use of business intelligence by business employees will increase from 30% today to 75% by 2020. (Fad or Frontier, 2013). Business Intelligence in a Company

Figure 1 (Business Intelligence & Analytics)

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Motivation and Problem

Today, Bealls is operating in a fast-paced world, and a prerequisite for success is to make full use of the large amount of data available to businesses. In other words, if Bealls desires to achieve an overwhelming success as a chain store in the competitive retail market, we must rely on a powerful tool to analyze the acquired data and react accordingly. One of the options is Business Intelligence technology, which helps to bridge the gap between the business, its IT, and its management, as shown in Figure 2. Business Intelligence joins business departments

Figure 2 (Corporate Success through Business Intelligence)

The major challenge that Bealls is facing is that it cannot analyze data quickly enough to respond rapidly to consumer demand. The existing technology that Bealls uses does not provide real time visualization and subsequent quick usage of its data. As shown in Figure 3, Bealls issue is the primary reason why many companies adopt BI solutions.

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Drivers of BI in retail

Figure 3 (Aberdeen group, 2006)

About SAP Lumira SAP Lumira is a BI solution designed and packaged to enable business users to make informed and rapid decisions based on real-time data. Using Lumira, our business analysts can better understand, analyze, and predict what is occurring in the overall environment and in the company. With the Lumira BI solution, Bealls will be able to organize data through a unified system, turn data into useful information, and share this information with those who need it, when they need it, and wherever they need it. Because Lumira is also scalable, we can expand the system in the future if necessary (Business intelligence).

Lumira can provide a win-win solution for IT and business teams at Bealls. On the IT side, our IT department can work more productively with business analysis and operation teams to respond to special requests (Timo, 2009). On the business side, the analysts can develop, query, and analyze data quickly with the auto-generate reporting function in Lumira without relying on the IT department (Business intelligence).

As shown in Figure 4, with SAP Lumira we can:

Centralize the data across Bealls Uncover hidden business information and patterns Share the findings easily on all types of platforms

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Integrate with legacy systems and current production system SAP Lumira Processes

Figure 4. (Fox)

Centralizing Data SAP Lumira provides our analysts an all-in-one interface that can help them extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from the data center in real time. Lumira shares data with data centers such as SAP HANA, and subsequently combines structured and unstructured data with which our analysts will be able to see the bigger picture of the business environment. This means that our operation and IT teams can save time in preparing data for further analysis by managing the data sources in the same view. For many companies, more than half of the time analyzing data is spent in data pre-processing. Now with Lumira, the embedded data input module enables business analysts and IT specialists to build up their data flow for accessing and updating data without any delay (Business intelligence). Analyzing Data Lumira provides data visualization tools called Dashboards and Scorecards to help our business analysts interact with the data storage system. By using the visual reporting panel, business analysts can quickly identify outliers and uncover hidden information. In addition, the business users can use what-if analysis to simulate the impact of decisions before they are implemented. Lumira also provides a statistical analysis and data mining feature for our business analysts to build prediction models (Business intelligence).

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Sharing

SAP Lumira provides the cloud service which allows users to migrate their data storage center to an SAP host server. By using Lumira, Bealls business users can deliver reports to others by saving them on the cloud server, which can be seen in Figure 5. Lumira also has an offline mode, which allows users to review reports when they are disconnected from the network, such as when they are meeting with clients or traveling. As a result, users can always stay in touch with the business (Business intelligence).

SAP Lumira sharing portals

Figure 5. (Fox)

Benefits of SAP Lumira For Bealls to stay competitive in the retail market, business intelligence software must be used to make quicker and more effective business decisions. SAP Lumira can deliver on these requirements, reducing labor costs and creating a positive return on investment.

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

SAP Lumira can reduce labor costs by streamlining the process of report creation. The software suite can automatically create measures based on current data, which reduces the time spent transferring information and manual data entry (Ignite Your Creative Ideas, 2013). It can also simplify report creation with its simple user interface without requiring any complicated programming, allowing technical experts to be used more efficiently. This simplicity also leads to less training and documentation for the constant report maintenance needed in the company. Our IT department will also have a lower workload as the product will allow for more streamlined data retrieval and usage, creating less dependency on IT.

SAP Lumira: Helps users identify and eliminate outliers in data. Filters and categorizes data as specified. Combines data from multiple external sources

SAP Lumira will allow for better decisions by any decision maker in the company, from managers all the way up to executives. With the ability to use more up-to-date data, these employees will be able to more effectively make important decisions based on what is happening now rather than basing their thoughts on old data. When employees need to rely on more specific data for these decisions, they can also drill down into charts and graphs, making it quick and easy to delve deeper into the data itself with this software (Ignite Your Creative Ideas, 2013). Then, when a decision needs to be asked of a manager, SAP Lumira makes it easy to push relevant reports to these decision makers as well.

SAP Lumira allows all the departments that use it to manage the increasingly large amount of data that comes into Bealls more quickly. This leads to quicker report creation and quicker decision making which allows for immediate response from positive or negative events. This suite also allows all users to put new data to use as soon as it comes in, reducing the wait time for reports on a daily basis. Data can also be combined in different configurations rapidly since the software has the capability to switch between views and data being used (Ignite Your Creative Ideas, 2013). This all allows quicker access to

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information, and that means that decisions can be reached faster and with less hassle. As a result, the lag time between decision and action is reduced because the train of thought of the decision maker is made seamless.

SAP Lumira software provides one of the fastest ways to get answers from data. Using an engaging interface and beautiful visualizations, we can analyze data quickly and discover unique insights which increase business agility. Because the software can connect to the SAP HANA platform, answers can be found instantly even when they are buried in massive amounts of data (Ignite Your Creative Ideas, 2013). Cost and ROI Each individual desktop license for Lumira is $1000, which we would want installed on the computers of store managers and corporate employees who need to prepare and use reports. This initial installation would be $250,000 for 250 employees. Servers and software for the other components of the Lumira suite would cost another $250,000, for a grand total of $500,000 for the initial implementation of SAP Lumira. Return on investment for companies that implement a business intelligence solution is 457% on average with a payback period of less than 1 year (Morris, 2003). This means that this investment has a very high chance of being profitable. A good example is Munich Airport International, who has seen a 182 percent return on its investment and saved almost 1.8 million Euro in planning costs with its SAP business intelligence solution (Munich Airport International, 2006).

Conclusion To succeed in the dynamic retail industry, we need to be vigilant of our consumers ever changing needs and desires to stay competitive with other retailers. An Aberdeen research study has shown that at least 67% of Best in Class retailers [with annual store sales growth of more than 3%] have enterprise -wide business intelligence applications budgeted or in place (Aberdeen, 2006). Business Intelligence is essential given the exponentially increasing amount of data that sources like social media marketing are beginning to create. A solution such as SAP Lumira not only reduces the time spent creating meaningful

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reports out of consumer and company data, but also allows managers to make informed decisions based on market trends. In regards to costs, the initial investment is substantial, but the benefits outweigh these costs. Based on its features and quick return on investment, SAP Lumira is the best choice of business intelligence software for our company. It is recommended that a committee be tasked to conduct an analysis on deploying SAP Lumira at Bealls by September 2014. I can be reached at 954-555-9812 or at david.james@beallsflorida.com.

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

References Aberdeen group (2006). Business intelligence in retail. Retrieved March 31, 2014, from https://www2.microstrategy.com/download/files/whitepapers/open/Aberdeen-BI-in-RetailBenchmark.pdf Business intelligence: A guide for midsize companies. (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2014, from http://www.illumiti.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/BI_A_Guide_for_Mid_Size_Companies_ENdocument91.pdf Business Intelligence for Retail: KPI for Retail Industry. (2013). Retrieved April 1, 2014, from http://www.elegantjbi.com/solutions/industry_bi_for_retail.htm Corporate success through business intelligence. (n.d.). Retrieved March 31, 2014, from http://www.computernetworksit.com.au/blog/corporate-success-through-business-intelligence/ Fad or Frontier: Is Big Data an Under-Utilised Asset?. (2013, September 16). Retrieved April 2, 2014, from http://knowledge.asb.unsw.edu.au/printer_friendly.cfm?articleid=1820

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Fox, A. (n.d.). Sap lumira: What's all the noise about. Retrieved from http://thinkingbi.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/sap-lumira-whats-all-the-noise-about-scn.pdf
Ignite your creative ideas with fast and engaging data discovery. (n.d.). Retrieved March 31, 2014, from http://www.sap.com/bin/sapcom/en_us/downloadasset.2012-10-oct-25-07.ignite-your-creative-ideaswith-fast-and-engaging-data-discovery-pdf.html KPMG (2013). 2013 Retail industry outlook survey. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from https://www.kpmg.com/US/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/retail-outlooksurvey-2013.pdf Morris, H. The Financial Impact of Business Analytics: Build vs. Buy. DM Review (13:1), 2003, pp. 4041. Munich airport international generates 182 percent return on investment using SAP Net Weaver(R) business intelligence. (2006, Mar 13). Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/451207390?accountid=10920

WHY BEALLS NEEDS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Timo, E. (2009, July 13). Implementing business intelligence standards: Save money and improve business insight. Retrieved from http://timoelliott.com/blog/2009/07/implementing-businessintelligence-standards-save-money-and-improve-business-insight.html

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