Ben & Jerry's makes amazing ice cream. Bigelow Teas probably makes great tea. (I wouldn't really know because I don't drink tea.) How do these companies continue year after year to produce excellent products for their consumers? Business Intelligence is the answer. Lets look at some different aspects of collecting BI within these two companies.
1. If you were to design Ben & jerry's data warehouse what dimensions of information would you include? Well to name a few...
- Employees
- Distribution
- Marketing
- Merchandising (such as changing the cherry garcia label so people don't think they deserve more cherries)
- Sales
- Production
- Service
- Flavors of Ice Cream
- Suppliers
- Branches (stores)
- employees
- trucks
3. How was part of the success of BusinessObjects related to the closeness of its look and feel to excel? Simple. It brought its past of unusually user-unfriendliness and introduced it to an interface that everyone already knows and loves: Microsoft Excel. In this way time or money wasn't lost attempting to teach users how to navigate a new program.
4. How could Bigelow Teas open up its business intelligence information to its suppliers and resellers?
- When BI is used effectively it helps to some degree.
- Bigelow Teas would in turn reap the benefits of the success underneath.
- Info such as $ from the top, stuff like that.
5. When talking about business decision making Neil Hastie says its: "a lot of by-guess and by-golly and by-golly, a lot of by-gut, and a whole lot of paper reports." This doesn't look so hot for BI. How can this quote be turned into something positive? Ok while it may be true that it takes a lot of guess work it also takes the right combination of information, the right timing, right tools, and everything coming together at the same time. Seems impossible? Well its not.
