Retail, supply chain sector ripe for real-time BI

Real-time business intelligence is the next big wave driving BI, and it will have a major impact on the retail and supply chain industries where competition is fierce and the dynamics are extreme, says Keith Jones, MD of Harvey Jones Systems.

Traditional BI has been good at solving many of the management information issues prevalent in the past. However, management was missing a vital link in the decision-making process. It could accurately highlight what had happened, but they did not have the capabilities to look at the happenings of right now.

In the retail and supply chain sectors, success depends on organisations providing enough stock at the right time, place and price to meet demands, so real-time information and BI is crucial.

There are numerous source transactional systems collecting and providing up-to-the-minute data in many different formats to different business users, covering points of sale, stock, warehousing, financials, customer relationship management, supply chain and logistics, route planning, and load optimisation.

However, getting an up-to-date, holistic view of the business across all of these transactional systems is not easy, and determining the impact of trends and actions is harder still.

The operational resources in the different business silos are unlikely to have a need for real-time BI and simple reporting and query tools are sufficient in these environments. However, understanding consumer spending and habits, gathering competitive intelligence and performing impact analysis allows the organisation to be proactive and address problems as they arise. Nothing can be done to fix performance after the fact.

Up-to-the-minute campaign analysis can allow successful campaigns to be rolled out and optimised, while unsuccessful campaigns and initiatives can be stopped sooner. Consumer reaction can be tested and monitored right away. The advantages to knowing what competitors are doing will allow organisations to react immediately to threats.

In environments as competitive as retail and supply chain, reducing information latency is the key to competing successfully. Real-time BI provides the ability to access data from multiple platforms in multiple formats, collate it, and present it to business users in a format they can understand. It provides an instant logical view of the business rather that a physical view of the data.

BI is not about he who has the most information, but rather about he who has the most information and is prepared to act on it. Information must be translated into action. Real-time BI will deliver valuable up-to-the-minute information that will give the business precious insights. Its value lies not in answering the question "what is going on", but answering "what is the impact likely to be?".

The life span of information in real-time BI is much shorter than that of the traditional trend information as its value erodes much faster. Unless the information is acted on immediately, and the business processes and culture encourage this action, then the benefits of real-time BI are limited.

The retail and supply chain markets are complex, and any information advantage they can gleam should translate into returns. The longer an organisation is able to maintain its advantage, the greater these return are likely to be.