Fresh Direct Business Intelligence
Case Summary
FreshDirect is the largest online grocery firm in the New York market, and one of the largest in the country. With more than 250,000 customers ordering over 8,500 products every day, the company faced severe logistics and management decision making issues. To solve these issues, FreshDirect adopted a comprehensive enterprise data base system from SAP which utilized a number of business intelligence applications to track orders and customers.
SAP AG is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software. The company's best-known software products are its enterprise resource planning application (SAP ERP), its enterprise data warehouse solution - SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HANA. SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world.
1. How is it possible, as Braddock noted, to have a great deal of data but little information? How does the SAP data base and business intelligence component change this?
Answer:
‘To have a great deal of data but little information’ is only possible when there is a lot of data but none of it is sorted or organized properly. If we distinguish between ‘data’ and ‘information then we’ll see that; Data is raw, unorganized facts that need to be processed. Data can be something simple and seemingly random and useless until it is organized. Whereas when data is processed, organized, structured or presented in a given context so as to make it useful, it is called Information.
FreshDirect has to deal with thousands of customers, their order, delivery time and place and the required human resource for the business to run. But this required huge amount of data collection in a very
FreshDirect is the largest online grocery firm in the New York market, and one of the largest in the country. With more than 250,000 customers ordering over 8,500 products every day, the company faced severe logistics and management decision making issues. To solve these issues, FreshDirect adopted a comprehensive enterprise data base system from SAP which utilized a number of business intelligence applications to track orders and customers.
SAP AG is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software. The company's best-known software products are its enterprise resource planning application (SAP ERP), its enterprise data warehouse solution - SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HANA. SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world.
1. How is it possible, as Braddock noted, to have a great deal of data but little information? How does the SAP data base and business intelligence component change this?
Answer:
‘To have a great deal of data but little information’ is only possible when there is a lot of data but none of it is sorted or organized properly. If we distinguish between ‘data’ and ‘information then we’ll see that; Data is raw, unorganized facts that need to be processed. Data can be something simple and seemingly random and useless until it is organized. Whereas when data is processed, organized, structured or presented in a given context so as to make it useful, it is called Information.
FreshDirect has to deal with thousands of customers, their order, delivery time and place and the required human resource for the business to run. But this required huge amount of data collection in a very