Management Information Systems

By: Divyae Mohan Sherry (1620313)

About Starbucks

Starbucks Corporation is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain. Starbucks was founded in
Seattle, Washington in 1971. As of November 2016, it operates 23,768 locations worldwide.

Starbucks locations serve hot and cold drinks, whole-bean coffee, micro ground instant coffee known as
VIA, espresso, caffe latte, full- and loose-leaf teas including Teavana tea products, Evolution Fresh juices,
Frappuccino beverages, La Boulange pastries, and snacks including items such as chips and crackers;
some offerings (including their annual fall launch of the Pumpkin Spice Latte) are seasonal or specific to
the locality of the store.

Information Systems Used

Starbucks mainly uses four Information Systems:

• Transaction Processing System.

• Supply Chain Management System.

• Decision Support System.

• Customer Relationship Management System.

Decision Systems Used

A decision support system (DSS) is a system based information system that supports business or
organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels
of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and help people make decisions about
problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e. unstructured and semi-
structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized, human-
powered or a combination of both.

DSS is a computer program application that analyzes business data and presents it so that user can more
easily take their business decisions. Starbucks uses a singular DSS system at the parent company in USA:
“oracle”. Oracle generates monthly reports on which important decisions are based. Only the parent
company has the authority make decisions about products.

Starbucks had built its point-of-sale data warehouse on Oracle technology. This foundation, plus the
Oracle OLAP option on Oracle Exadata Database Machine, enabled Starbucks to scale and seamlessly
migrate its existing Oracle-based data warehouse to Oracle Exadata to expand insight and facilitate
decisions, even with explosive growth in data and the user population.

Why Oracle Systems?

Starbucks had built its point-of-sale data warehouse on Oracle technology. This foundation, plus the
Oracle OLAP option on Oracle Exadata Database Machine, enabled Starbucks to scale and seamlessly
migrate its existing Oracle-based data warehouse to Oracle Exadata to expand insight and facilitate
decisions, even with explosive growth in data and the user population.

Challenges

Create a robust, 24/7-available enterprise data warehouse containing sales, marketing, store
management, point of sale, customer loyalty, and supply chain data to drive more informed business
decisions at the corporate, regional, and store levels. Improve ability to rapidly analyze and act on
customer loyalty, coffee sales, and supply chain information to continue to drive innovation. Ensure
scalability to support rapid growth in data volume
Solutions

Starbucks used Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to
create a high-performance enterprise data warehouse and business intelligence environment that
provides analysts and managers at the branch, field, and corporate levels with timely and actionable
insight into store and product performance, as well as supply chain operations.

This helped them gain the ability to load and refresh data from all stores in time for US East Coast store
openings each morning, completing full loads in just four hours, and ensuring service level agreement
compliance.

Enabled the company to load point-of-sale and customer loyalty data daily from 10,000 US stores to the
data warehouse and answer most queries such as information on coffee sales, promotions, and product
mixes in individual stores in fewer than 10 seconds.

Implemented Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression to optimize storage area usage and compress 70
terabytes of raw data to approximately 20 terabytes in one case condensing 2 terabytes of table data to
275 gigabytes, an almost 90% footprint reduction.

Utilized Oracle OLAP option, enabling 1-terabyte cubes to be available for fast and sophisticated
analytics.

Developed a front-end dashboard of key business indicators that enables 10,000 users including store
and corporate managers to gain rapid visibility into store-level sales and operational data.

Increased product analysts’ insight into customer preferences to facilitate strategic development and
product launches.

Reduced by hours the time that store managers spend on weekly re ports, while simultaneously
expanding insight and improving decision-making across thousands of stores.

Oracle Product and Services used by Starbucks

Oracle OLAP is a world class multidimensional analytic engine embedded in Oracle Database 12c. Oracle
OLAP cubes deliver sophisticated calculations using simple SQL queries - producing results with speed of
thought response times. This outstanding query performance may be leveraged transparently when
deploying OLAP cubes as materialized views – enhancing the performance of summary queries against
detail relational tables. Because Oracle OLAP is embedded in Oracle Database 12c, it allows centralized
management of data and business rules in a secure, scalable and enterprise-ready platform.
Oracle OLAP makes it easy to produce analytic measures, including time-series calculations, financial
models, forecasts, allocations, regressions, and more. Hundreds of analytic functions can be easily
combined in custom functions to solve nearly any analytic calculation requirement. Oracle OLAP cubes
are represented using a star schema design: dimension views form a constellation around the cube (or
fact) view. This standard representation of OLAP data makes it easy for any reporting and analysis tool
or application - including sophisticated business intelligence solutions, SQL-based development tools
and Microsoft Excel - to leverage the power of Oracle OLAP in a simple and productive way.

With Oracle OLAP you can:

 Easily define a multidimensional model with advanced analytic calculations

 Productively deliver rich analytics to any reporting and analysis tool using simple SQL
 Transparently improve summary queries against tables using cube-based materialized views
 Combine OLAP data with any other data in your Oracle Database - including spatial, data mining,
XML, documents and more
 Leverage your existing Oracle Database expertise and software investment

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is engineered to be the highest performing and most available
platform for running the Oracle Database. Exadata is a modern architecture featuring scale -out industry-
standard database servers, scale-out intelligent storage servers, and an extremely high speed InfiniBand
internal fabric that connects all servers and storage. Unique software algorithms in Exadata implement
database intelligence in storage, PCI based flash, and InfiniBand networking to deliver higher
performance and capacity at lower costs than other platforms. Exadata runs all types of database
workloads including Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Data Warehousing (DW) and consolidation of
mixed workloads. Simple and fast to implement, the Exadata Database Machine powers and protects
your most important databases and is the ideal foundation for a consolidated database cloud.

Database Machine Benefits

Best Data Warehouse platform: Accelerate data warehouse query performance by up to a factor of 10x
or more, and run more queries concurrently for faster access to business-critical information.
Best OLTP platform: Accelerate performance of OLTP oriented workloads through a combination of
large physical flash, ultra high-speed flash compression, and smart flash caching algorithms which can
provide millions of I/Os per second.

Best Consolidation platform: Replace isolated special-purpose system with a consolidated platform
delivering leading performance and scalability for all database applications. Exadata has the unique
ability to transparently prioritize requests as they flow from database servers, through network adapters
and network switches, to storage, and back.

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications are complete, prebuilt BI solutions that deliver intuitive,
role-based intelligence for everyone in an organization from front line employees to senior management
that enable better decisions, actions, and business processes. Designed for heterogeneous
environments, these solutions enable organizations to gain insight from a range of data sources and
applications including Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and third party systems such as SAP

Oracle BI Applications are built on the Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, a comprehensive, innovative,
and leading BI platform. This enables organizations to realize the value of a packaged BI Application,
such as rapid deployment, lower TCO, and built-in best practices, while also being able to very easily
extend those solutions to meet their specific needs, or build completely custom BI applications, all on
one common BI architecture.

 Oracle financial analytics (OFA)

 Oracle HR analytics (OHRA)
 Oracle marketing analytics (OMA)
 Oracle vertical (industry specific) analytics
 Oracle sales analytics (OSA)
 Oracle service analytics (OSEA)
 Oracle supply chain analytics (OSCA)

A word from Starbucks Coffee Company

"Our Oracle Exadata-based database warehouse and Oracle Business Intelligence environment deliver
detailed insight into point-of-sale data that allows us to innovate and offer our customers better
services." – Mike Manzano, Vice President, Analytics and Insight, Starbucks Coffee Company.
Recommendations

 Using quick communication systems like Slack and Flock for communications
 Integrating Analytics and BI Systems from IBM Watson
 Integrating CRMs like Freshdesk on Mobile Apps and in stores.