How business intelligence tools can help improve pizza delivery
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The Papa Gino's restaurant chain is using BI software to try to improve its ability to accurately tell customers when their pizzas will be delivered to them.
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For those who doubt the change our daily lives have undergone thanks to increased connectivity, Domino's Pizza presents to you....Pizza Tracking.
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InfoWorld - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications.
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Giving employees, customers and vendors easy-to-use analytics tools that deliver complex reports in real time promises to reshape the business landscape. Learn how SAP deployments running on Dual-core Intel Xeon processor-based blade-server systems provide enterprise-grade business analytics that empower business users and free IT professionals from the chore of running analytics reports.
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Implementing a CRM system and putting some business intelligence into the processes may help in boosting sales or in creating an end-to-end strategy for those who have been around during the implementation, but what happens when a new hire sits in front of the complex, customized application?
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Customers share what's working for them, and analysts weigh in about best practices.
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Bookselling giant Barnes and Noble outlined plans to implement the SQL Server 2000 Business Intelligence offering. &quot;SQL Server 2000 will significantly reduce the time it takes our developers to aggregate data.
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Semiconductor and cell-phone technology converge in fast food.
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(InfoWorld) - If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.Â  A host of technology companies are working on the science behind taking these measurements. Perhaps the newest of these event stream processing or complex event processing vendors is Amalgamated Insight, a Silicon Valley startup founded on work led by co-founder and CTO Michael Franklin at U.C. Berkeley, where Franklin is a professor of computer science. Amalgamated is just emerging from stealth mode and may have a new name by the time you read this. The seed of Amalgamated was planted in Franklin's frustration at what he considered wrong-headed approaches to the analysis problem. Many seemed to think that analyzing event streams -- be they RFID events from sensor networks, service events from SOA networks, system events from traditional networks, events from financial markets, or other kinds of electronic transactions -- was merely a matter of plumbing. If you could just get this device talking with that device, you would somehow enable pervasive computing. "And my view," Franklin recalls, "was that once you solved the plumbing problems, what you've got is a data management problem. Because you've got huge volumes of data being created all over the place. Lots of applications need that data, and lots of users need insight into what's going on in these dispersed environments." Beyond the plumbing, others were trying to reinvent the wheel. Attending an RFID standardization meeting as a guest, Franklin listened as group after group, each working at a different level of the system, described the data at their level and how to access it. And he realized, each one was defining a data model and a query language, and each one was different. That's when the seed sprouted. "Sitting there as a database guy, I was just getting irritated," he says. "Jeez, why wouldn't you just use SQL for all of this stuff across all the levels? And on the way home from that meeting, I realized, well, you know, why don't I just do that." Amalgamated's three-part solution combines a stream processing engine, a Java-based integration framework, and a visualization front end based on Adobe Flex. Naturally, the processing engine, which is embedded into the open-source PostgreSQL database, uses SQL to continuously query events as they flow past. "It lets you write SQL queries that are basically always running," Franklin explains. "They're always producing the answer so far based on the data they've seen so far." To enable SQL to query infinite data streams, Amalgamated extended it in two ways, adding a windowing capability to restrict the amount of data it would be exposed to in any instant and adding some "syntactic sugar" to define event patterns you might want to inspect. The "continuous analysis" engine is adaptive, Franklin says, meaning you can add or remove queries on the fly. Amalgamated sees the decision to embed the core processing engine in Postgres not only as key to advancing the development effort, but also as a key differentiator in the marketplace. Franklin notes that it gave the solution complete SQL, JDBC, and ODBC interfaces, internationalization, and all of the extensibility of Postgres right out of the box. As Boyd Pierce, the company's president and CEO, points out, Postgres lets users of Amalgamated's engine to write SQL that joins tables and streams, provides subqueries and views, and does all the magic that SQL can do. Programmers already know how to code in it. "We got all that based on having Postgres," Pierce notes. "But the other thing we've found in dealing with customers in our application space is that if you don't have a relational database that speaks full SQL and lets people program, you're hugely disadvantaged in terms of doing what the customer needs." Noting that Postgres allowed Amalgamated "to jump in front of a 10-year database systems development curve," Franklin sees a larger lesson in building on the open-source database. "We really hit upon what I think is the future of enterprise software development," he concludes. "If you start from scratch today, if you're building anything complex, you're crazy. That's just not going to be a viable way to build enterprise software in the future. You're going to have to leverage open source and other available tools that are out there."
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BI want to break free Whitepaper Business Intelligence (or BI) is often promoted as a âget out of gaol freeâ card â surely, intelligence in business is a good thing (although perhaps we wouldnât know, we havenât met much of it), so paying lots of money for a BI package is a no-brainer?â¦
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There's a lot of data out there, but using it wisely is a challenge. In this Executive Briefing, we look at the theory and practice of data-driven decision making. We hear from experts and examine successful implementations of information management technologies.
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IT managers say presentation and security are crucial when getting business intelligence information to the appropriate people over the network.
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Nutrition, obsession, global business:  an exploration of our second most basic desire.
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(Source: Tibco)  The future of business intelligence demands visualization capabilities that let users see the relationships among data, interactivity that lets them manipulate the data and an intuitive manner of working that suits the way business users think. Enterprise analytics enable business users to access the information and metrics relevant to their particular roles to assist the company in reaching its current goals and setting new ones for the future.
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L'utile batte nettamente le stime degli analisti
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With the introduction of Real-Time Decision Manager from SAS, the expanding use of predictive analytics synchronized to work with a concurrent business process will receive a major boost.The SAS technology taps into the wealth of analytical data gathered from a company?s databases and scores the company's customers for potential up-sell and cross-sell marketing opportunities.For example, during a transaction -- be it a telephone customer service call or a Web purchase -- Real-Time Decision Manager can direct the customer service representative (CSR) to offer the customer an additional service or product or make an online offer.SAS's global marketing manger Larry Mosiman, believes that Decision Manager will increase wallet share for its customers and help to reduce customer attrition, especially in the highly volatile communications industry.The technology creates a decision diagram that can be based on new information that is captured during the course of a transaction, said Mosiman."Real-Time Decision Manager is all about putting the process flow together to take into account the information gained, even during a conversation that might affect the outcome," said Mosiman.The technology typically comes back with a sub-second response and will handle approximately a thousand transactions per minute.?The concept of decision making in real time is not new. Companies as far back as Compaq were designing similar products; one in particular Compaq called ZLE, for Zero Latency Enterprise.The idea behind real-time decision making, according to Gareth Herschel, a Gartner analyst, has a number of major components.First, it makes intelligent decisions part of the business process."Instead of having somebody going off and doing analysis that is not tied into a business process, this is part of the process," said Herschel.The other key component is that this is not just a way of scoring the customer. Rather, it recommends an action to an agent and may even provide a script for the agent to follow for an up-sell opportunity.There are challenges to the idea, however.Mainly, CSRs are not typically salespeople who are comfortable up-selling a customer. In addition, it flies in the face of how call centers work.Keeping service center costs down is typically based on how quickly a CSR can handle a customer's problem and get them off the phone or off-line. By trying to up-sell or cross-sell a customer, more contact time -- not less -- will be required.Nevertheless, Herschel said although SAS is late to the market with this kind of product, because of its clout in the industry, the idea of? putting decision-making at the point of sale will gain wider acceptance in the enterprise.SAS also announced 1-800-Flowers as its first customer for the product, which is shipping now.
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As important as a physical supply chain Readers may recall that I wrote last year about Silver Creek SystemsÂ®. At that time I extolled its capabilities for product data quality (matching, cleansing and classification) through the use of semantically-based content profiling and attribute identification. This is particularly relevant when information comes into the organization in unstructured formats as most conventional data quality tools have historically been limited to support for structured information.â¦