NMIMS Global Access

School for Continuing Education (NGA-SCE)

Course: Fundamentals of Big Data & Business Analytics
Internal Assignment Applicable for June 2021 Examination

Q-1.
The emerging technological development of big data is recognized as one of the most
important areas of future information technology and is evolving at a rapid speed, driven in
part by social media and the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon. The technological
developments in big data infrastructure, analytics, and services allow firms to transform
themselves into data-driven organizations. IDC (2015) forecasted that the big data
technology and services market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.1% over
the 2014—2019 period, with annual spending reaching $48.6 billion in 2019. While
structured data is an essential part of big data, more and more data are created in unstructured
video and image forms, which traditional data management technologies are inadequate to
process. A large portion of data worldwide have been generated by billions of IoT devices
such as smart home appliances, wearable devices, and environmental sensors.
To meet the ever-increasing storage and processing needs of big data, several new big data
platforms are emerging, including NoSQL databases as an alternative to traditional
relational databases and Hadoop as an open-source framework for inexpensive distributed
clusters of commodity hardware. *
Source: *https://e-tarjome.com/storage/panel/fileuploads/2019-02-27/1551256718_E10700-
e-tarjome.pdf
Q-1(a) a) Mention at least 2 possible business applications which are enabled by the existence
of big data platforms and how do these leverage big data?

Introduction Big Data Platform refers to IT solutions that combine several Big
Data Tools and utilities into one packaged answer, and this is then
used further for managing as well as analyzing Big Data. The
emphasis on why this is needed is taken care of later in the blog,
but know how much data is getting created daily. This Big Data if
not maintained well, enterprises are bound to lose out on
customers. Let’s get started with the basics.

Concepts and Applications of Big Data in the Banking and Securities

Application related to Industry
the question The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is using Big Data to
monitor financial market activity. They are currently using
network analytics and natural language processors to catch illegal
 trading activity in the financial markets.
Retail traders, Big banks, hedge funds, and other so-called ‘big
boys’ in the financial markets use Big Data for trade analytics used
in high-frequency trading, pre-trade decision-support analytics,
sentiment measurement, Predictive Analytics, etc.

This industry also heavily relies on Big Data for risk analytics,
including; anti-money laundering, demand enterprise risk
management, "Know Your Customer," and fraud mitigation.
Big Data providers are specific to this industry includes 1010data,
Panopticon Software, Streambase Systems, Nice Actimize, and
Quartet FS.

2. Communications, Media and Entertainment

Industry-specific Big Data Challenges
Since consumers expect rich media on-demand in different formats
and a variety of devices, some Big Data challenges in the
communications, media, and entertainment industry include:
 Collecting, analyzing, and utilizing consumer insights
 Leveraging mobile and social media content
 Understanding patterns of real-time, media content usage

Conclusion Generally, most organizations have several goals for adopting Big
Data projects. While the primary goal for most organizations is to
enhance customer experience, other goals include cost reduction,
better-targeted marketing, and making existing processes more
efficient. In recent times, data breaches have also made enhanced
security an important goal that Big Data projects seek to
incorporate.

Q.1(b)
How do cloud platforms fuel the growth of big data and the benefits which companies seek
through cloud technologies to build data analytics solutions? Illustrate with examples.

Introduction The advancement of technology has allowed companies to reap the

benefits of streamlined processes and cost-efficient operations. But
the one thing that has become a game changer for businesses of all
sizes is the availability of data from every source imaginable –
social media, sensors, business applications, and many more.

Concepts and Benifit of putting big data in the cloud:

Application related to The shift to big data in the cloud isn’t surprising considering the
the question
many benefits that the powerful combination of big data analytics
and cloud computing can bring. Here are the key advantages.
Requires zero CAPEX
The cloud has fundamentally changed IT spending as
organizations know it—and in a good way. As we mentioned
earlier, big data projects require immense infrastructure resources,
which traditionally would also mean high on-premise capital
expenditure (CAPEX) investments. But the cloud’s Infrastructure-
as-a-Service models have allowed companies to practically
eliminate its biggest CAPEX expenses by shifting these into the
operating expenditure (OPEX) column. So when you need to set
up your database servers or data warehouses, you won’t need to
make massive upfront investments.
This has been one of the most compelling benefits that has
convinced businesses to migrate to the cloud.
Enables faster scalability
Large volumes of both structured and unstructured data requires
increased processing power, storage, and more. The cloud provides
not only readily-available infrastructure, but also the ability to
scale this infrastructure really quickly so you can manage large
spikes in traffic or usage.
Lowers the cost of analytics
Mining big data in the cloud has made the analytics process less
costly. In addition to the reduction of on-premise infrastructure,
you can also save on costs related to system maintenance and
upgrades, energy consumption, facility management, and more.
You can also worry less about the technical aspects of processing
big data and focus more on creating insights. Even better, the
cloud’s pay-as-you-go model is more cost-efficient, with little
waste of resources.
Encourages an agile and innovative culture
The ability to innovate is a mindset that should be cultivated
within any enterprise. This type of culture can lead to creative
ways of using big data to gain a competitive advantage, and the
cloud makes it easier to spin up the necessary infrastructure to do
so. When your team focuses on analyzing data instead of
managing servers and databases, you can more easily and quickly
unearth insights that can help you augment product lines, boost
operational efficiency, improve customer service, and more.
Enables better business continuity and disaster recovery
In cases of cyber attacks, power outages or equipment failure,
traditional data recovery strategies will no longer do the trick. The
task of replicating a data center – with duplicate storage, servers,
networking equipment, and other infrastructure – in preparation for
 a disaster is tedious, difficult, and expensive.
In addition, legacy systems often take very long to back up and
restore. This is especially true in the era of big data, when data
stores are so immense and expansive.Having the data stored in
cloud infrastructure will allow your organization to recover from
disasters faster, thus ensuring continued access to information and
vital big data insights.

Conclusion In order to analyze big data, you need to first identify the issues
that need solutions or answers. Then, attempt to identify the
answer to your question and ask yourself, ‘how can I get the data
to solve it?’ or ‘what can big data do for my business?’
Your big data solutions need to be user-friendly, match what you
had in mind for pricing, and flexible enough to serve your business
both now and in the future.
Research what the most reliable tool is for the problem you need to
solve. For example, if you want to launch more effective
promotions and marketing campaigns, you can use Canopy Labs,
which predicts customer behavior and sales trends.
There are many tools out there that are inexpensive or even free
that you can use. Google has user-friendly tools like Google
Adwords and Google BigQuery. Administering a survey is simple
and cheap using tools, such as SurveyMonkey and Doodle.

Q- 2.
State 3 use-cases of business analytics within the retail industry, highlighting usage of
descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics (2 each). Give an example of how mobile
analytics has been implemented in the industry and the resultant impact.

Introduction Retail analytics is the process of using analytical tools to provide

analysis of business trends, patterns, and performance in the retail
industry. Retail business analytics allow you to leverage data-
driven insight from your business and your customers to improve
the customer experience, increase your sales, and optimize
operations.

Concepts and Retailers now making the leap into prescriptive analytics are
Application related to transcending descriptive and predictive analytics to make better
the question decisions at scale – setting the right pricing, promotions and
assortments in every store at finer levels of granularity to delight
their best customers and drive loyalty.
Descriptive Analytics
Analyzes past data, such as the results of promotions, to provide
insights on why they succeeded or failed, to help the retailer
launch more successful promotions. It categorizes consumers in
large groups, offering few insights into individual behavior.
Retailers now making the leap into prescriptive analytics are
transcending descriptive and predictive analytics to make better
decisions at scale – setting the right pricing, promotions and
assortments in every store at finer levels of granularity to delight
their best customers and drive loyalty.
Predictive Analytics
Analyzes current and historical data to make general forecasts and
predictions, such as the probability of an event recurring in a
region. Can guide some basic decision making but does not
provide specific recommendations.
Predictive analytics, do not provide with these types of granular,
aisle-by-aisle recommendations every week or keep up with the
constantly changing nature of the endless aisle. Instead, it would
give data scientists forecasts for a narrow range of scenarios, and
the scientists would need to translate those forecasts into simple
information category managers might be able to use. Prescriptive
analytics uses pattern recognition to anticipate opportunities and
recommend the timing of promotions and price and assortment
changes in specific categories to raise foot traffic, basket size or
any other KPI. In our experience, when managers try and test the
recommendations that go against their gut feeling and quickly see
clear improvements in metrics such as basket size and same-store
sales, they become champions of prescriptive analytics tools – and
they tend to have more influence over their peers than data
scientists. After all, nearly every manager knows that in the blur of
day-to-day category management, patterns can be hard to spot. In
certain cities, avocado and chip sales might rise 5% on the Friday
before a typical big game, for example, but the prescriptive tool
might recommend stocking 20% more avocados and chips in
stores where the local teams are likely to make the playoffs. In
assortment, humans can set parameters then run a range of
scenarios. Prescriptive analytics can then identify an optimization
curve, recommend specific assortment changes, and estimate the
dollar value of those changes. The simplicity and clarity of these
interactions is part of what makes prescriptive analytics so
powerful.
Prescriptive Analytics
Using machine learning and tapping into a wider array of internal
and external data, it reveals previously unknown patterns and links
that drive results at the individual store, product and shelf level.
Data management is automated, and the system can make real-
time, easyto-understand recommendations about pricing,
assortment and promotions in each category in each store.
The new, much more sophisticated tools have arrived just in time
for many retailers. Data is piling up faster than they can analyze it,
data science talent is harder to recruit and retain, and shoppers can
 now compare the products and prices of a wider range of
competitors, including discount and specialty stores. Online
retailers, the biggest threat to many inherently brick-and-mortar
stores, are now gathering and crunching so much data that they can
adjust prices on thousands of products throughout the day to take
advantage of opportunities as they arise.
Today’s advanced analytics applications are possible because of
huge advances in computing power, avalanches of new data, new
data cleaning, storage and access methods, and more flexible
algorithms. Together, these advances allow retailers to automate
more of the data science originally performed by humans,
expanding their capacity for planning and management. Research
and experience show that in retailing, as in many other complex
activities, from flying jets to navigating traffic, humans and
machines working together are much more powerful than either
working alone. Each has information and abilities that are
inherently unavailable to the other.

Conclusion As we all know, predictive analytics helps brands forecast the

likely outcomes from a set of past customer actions. Compared to
prescriptive, it’s a slightly in the realm of conjecture, though based
on statistical techniques and data mining. Compared to it,
prescriptive is a more solid form of analytics; it helps companies
draw up specific recommendations based on the past history, and
has started to play an extremely crucial role in retaining customers.
After all, remedial action (prescriptive), is a far scientific and
better way of helping your customers by throwing up concrete
proposals than forecasting (predictive), what they (retailers) might
want while shopping.
For retailers to move on to prescriptive analytics, more so in real
time, has become a battlefront weapon in the war against the large
e-commerce firms like Amazon. With prescriptive analytics,
retailers can analyze different types of data such as geo-location,
trends, product availability and shopping peak hours.

Q-3.
“HURRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a
direct hit on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in
Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great
opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls
predictive technology. A week ahead of the storm’s landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart’s
chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had
happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier.”
a. Which type of analytics will be best suited to solve this problem and which technique will
you apply in this case? Explain the data needed to solve this problem.

Introduction Predictive Analytics: Emphasizes on predicting the possible

outcome using statistical models and machine learning techniques.

Concepts and Predictive analysis will be the most useful analysis for the wall-
Application related to Mart for forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane
the question Charley struck several weeks earlier.
Big Data is the basis for all predictive modeling tools. Predictive
Analytics is only as good as the data it has to evaluate. This is why
it is important to combine and clean up data from disparate data
sources to produce accurate analyses. The key fact is that no single
data point should be allowed to assert an undue influence.

The process involves modeling mathematical frameworks by

analyzing past and present data trends to predict future behaviors.
The data needed for predictive analytics is usually a mixture of
historical and real-time data.
Data needed for solving the above issue and performing predictive
analysis:
 Point-of-sale data
 Consumer-related information, including that of loyalty
programs
 Consumer demography
 Store and online navigation traffic flow
 Competitive intelligence
 Other external factors such as weather
Source to get the above data:
 Website
 Smartphone app
 Loyalty programs
 Point-of-sale systems
 Supply chain systems
 In-store sensors & cameras
 Social media networks

Conclusion Predictive analytics helps predict the likelihood of a future

outcome by using various statistical and machine learning
algorithms but the accuracy of predictions is not 100%, as it is
based on probabilities. To make predictions, algorithms take data
and fill in the missing data with the best possible guesses. This
data is pooled with historical data present in the CRM systems,
POS Systems, ERP, and HR systems to look for data patterns and
identify relationships among various variables in the dataset.
Q.3(b)
Explain the difference between BI and BA as to how can they help optimize supply chain
in this case? Illustrate the possible outcome achieved in each case (BI vs. BA) and how they
enable business objectives. You can make certain assumptions but highlight them clearly.

Introduction Business intelligence encompasses the collection and monitoring

of data to generate insights that optimize operational management
within an organization. BI tools include a wide variety of software
systems and applications, including data mining systems and
performance monitoring dashboards.
BA is a subset of business intelligence that is frequently employed
to optimize a BI strategy and improve future decision-making.
Business analytics uses historical and current statistical values to
forecast future events and generate recommendations that help
optimize future growth. Unlike BI, BA drills down into why an
event is occurring or why it did occur.

Concepts and BI helps companies predict patterns and prevailing trends from
Application related to their data. Improved knowledge of the market demand prevents
the question them from overstocking. It also helps supply chain managers track
shipments in real time and accurately predict delivery to
customers, which improves customer service.

Supply chain management and business analytics are broad

domains designed to improve operational performance and
certainly not reserved to a handful of production engineers, freight
transport specialists, or computer geeks
Business analytics allows organizations and managers: 
 to cope with ever increasing amounts of data and
information generated in all kinds of  formats and
representations, both internally and externally – so-called
Big Data ;
 to acquire more knowledge of their customers, of their
economic environment and of their own internal operations
;
 to take full advantage of available data for making smarter
decisions, for creating value, and for making better use of
scarce resources ;
 to support business insights and to move to fact-based
management by relying on data and on analytical
disciplines.
Conclusion Both supply chain management and business analytics rely on a
common set of tools and methods, and are being simultaneously
transformed by the ongoing digital revolution.
Australasian Conference on Information Systems Moniruzzaman
et al. 2015, Adelaide, South Australia Business Intelligence and
Supply Chain Agility BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND
SUPPLY CHAIN AGILITY Mohammad Moniruzzaman
Department of Computing and Information Systems The
University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria, Australia Email:
monir.australia@gmail.com Sherah Kurnia Department of
Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia Email: sherahk@unimelb.edu.au
Alison Parkes Department of Computing and Information Systems
The University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria, Australia Email:
aparkes@unimelb.edu.au Sean B. Maynard Department of
Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia Email:
sean.maynard@unimelb.edu.au Abstract Supply Chain Agility is
vital for organisations wanting to remain competitive in
today’s dynamic business environment. There is increasing
interest in deploying Business Intelligence (BI) in the Supply
Chain Management (SCM) context to improve Supply Chain
(SC) Agility. However, there is limited research exploring BI
contributions to SC Agility. In this research-in-progress paper
we propose a model based on a conceptual analysis of the
literature showing how BI can help organisations achieve SC
Agility by supporting the key areas of SCM (Plan, Source, Make,
Deliver, and Return). In the next stage of this project, we will
conduct a series of case studies investigating how organisations
use BI when managing their SC activities and how BI
contributes to SC Agility. The result of the study will help
organizations deploy BI effectively to support SCM and
improve SC Agility.