Chenwei Liu
What is Business Intelligence (BI)? BI is the way that using modern data warehouse technology, online analytical processing, and data mining to analysis the data then achieve business value. As a tool, BI is used to deal with the existing data in the enterprise, and convert it into knowledge, analysis and conclusions, and then help the decision-maker to make a right and wise decision.
In the "Business Intelligence Software at SYSCO" case, SYSCO plans to use the BI software supplied by Business Objects to improve the ability of manage and analyze the data of whole company including all the operating companies. With the advanced way of data analysis, it’s easier for the decision maker of SYSCO to make a right and wise decision. And SYSCO can serve its customers better.
In this case, I pay attention to several questions:
1. Which of the typical types of problems with information use in decision making can such a BI system help alleviate?
SYSCO is a huge company that had 420,000 customers ranging from huge chain restaurants to “mom-and-pop” diners. It is a highly decentralized business composed of over 100 operating companies. Each operating company managers had substantial autonomy. In this organization, it’s very hard to collect all the information from all the operation companies, to say nothing of analyzing and using the data of all companies. The main reason why it’s hard to use the data is the huge amount of information. The original data contain too much information and it is useless for the decision maker to make a right decision. But with BI system, this problem could be solved easily. With BI’s capability of extraction, the companies can retrieval of data from different sources. Then it’s much easy for the executives to choose the useful information to use for the decision making. Data mining is another important capability of BI. It can analyze the large pools of historical