Individual Assignment

Business Intelligence Systems

CT106-3-3-BIS
UC3F1711CS(DA)

Name: Chuah Shang Rong (TP035052)

Date assigned: 28 November 2017

Date submission: 23 February 2018

Lecturer’s name: Mr. Mohd Najib

Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Company profile ............................................................................................................................. 4
Problem Statement .......................................................................................................................... 4
Aims & Objectives .......................................................................................................................... 4
Methodology ................................................................................................................................... 5
Business Intelligent System ............................................................................................................ 8
Importance of Business Intelligence ........................................................................................... 9
OLAP .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Data Warehouse ........................................................................................................................ 10
Principles of Business Intelligence ........................................................................................... 10
Types of BI Tools ..................................................................................................................... 12
BI Solution .................................................................................................................................... 13
BI Reports ..................................................................................................................................... 19
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 25
Reference ...................................................................................................................................... 26
Introduction

Business intelligence, as it is understood today, uses technology to gather and analyze data,
translate it into useful information to make better decisions for any organizations (Mike Biere,
2008). The term BI was coined by the Gartner Group in the mid 1990’s. However, the concept is
much older. Decision Support Systems (DSS) was the first database management system to be
developed (Keith D. Foote, 2017). Many historians suggest the modern version of Business
Intelligence evolved from the DSS database. In 1980’s, OLAP, Executive Information Systems
(EIS), and data warehouses were some of the tools developed to work with DSS (Data Economy,
2014). As business intelligence became a commonly known phrase in the late 1990’s and early
2000’s, dozens of new vendors hit the market as more and more companies were starting to
understand the true value of the BI currency, and how it could help them. During this period,
there were two basic functions of BI: producing data and reports, and organizing it and
visualizing it in a presentable way (Shaku Atre, 2009). As BI evolved with technology, BI
services began providing simplified tools, allowing decision makers to become more self-
sufficient. The tools were easier to use, provided the functionality needed, and were very
efficient. Business people could now gather data and gain insights by working directly with the
data (Susan Joly, 2016). After the evolution of BI in the early 2000’s, “Big Data” Emerges. Big
data is a term that describes the large volume of data – both structured and unstructured – that
inundates a business on a day-to-day basis (SAS, 2017). But it’s not the amount of data that’s
important. It’s what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for
insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves (Stephen J. Bigelow, 2016).
Big Data today is revolutionizing entire industries and changing human culture and behavior. It
is a result of the information age and is changing how people do in their daily life (Nate Philip,
2014).
Company profile
Floap inc. is equipped with over 10 years of industry experience, the business has been
successfully managed by the CEO Brandon Chuah and it continues to expand its business
presence and branding throughout East Malaysia and Brunei.

Today, Floap is one of the largest Reseller companies in East Malaysia with 28 franchise and
1500 employees over 80 districts. Floap’s core business focuses on providing market access and
coverage of products including accessories, bikes, clothing, and sports equipment.

Problem Statement
During these years, the company failed to adopt to business intelligence (BI) due to the
complexity and cost of implementing BI in the organization. Besides that, hiring employees with
BI skill sets would incur additional employee expense for the company and there is a concern it
don’t really have any benefits for the business. Recently, due to the past declines of the sales and
performance of the organization team, the company has faced major issues in maintaining the
operating cost for the organization. To solve this problem, the CEO decides to implement
business intelligence to identify business problems that need to addressed and improve internal
business processes of the company.

Aims & Objectives

The main goal of implementing business intelligence is to boost productivity and sales of the
company.

Below are the objective of the system:

1. To gain insights into consumer behavior by identifying the current consumer buying
trends and use this information to gain profit for the business.
2. To improve efficiency of the company. With BI, it enables the company to share
information across different departments and reduce duplication of work generated by
different departments which may cost time and money.
3. To gain competitive advantage. With BI, it strengthens the company’s ability to make
decisions and plan for the future.
4. Improve customer satisfactory rate by identifying the problems exists within the
organization and solutions to achieve it.
Methodology
CRISP-DM stands for cross-industry process for data mining. The CRISP-DM methodology
provides a structured approach to planning a data mining project. It is a popular and well-proven
methodology. Its flexibility and usefulness when using analytics can be used to solve
complicated business issues (SV Europe, 2015). Many of the tasks can be performed in a
different order and it will often be necessary to backtrack to previous tasks and repeat certain
actions.
The process or methodology of CRISP-DM is described in these six major steps

1. Business Understanding

Focuses on understanding the project objectives and requirements from a business perspective,
and then converting this knowledge into a data mining problem definition and a preliminary
plan. (William Vorhies, 2016)

2. Data Understanding

Starts with an initial data collection and proceeds with activities in order to get familiar with the
data, to identify data quality problems, to discover first insights into the data, or to detect
interesting subsets to form hypotheses for hidden information. (Sv-europe, 2015)

3. Data Preparation

The data preparation phase covers all activities to construct the final dataset from the initial raw
data. Data preparation tasks are likely to be performed multiple times, and not in any prescribed
order (Steph, 2017). The tasks include data cleaning, selection of table, record and attributes, as
well as data transformation for modeling tools.

4. Modeling

Modeling techniques are selected and applied. Besides that, their parameters are calibrated to
optimal values (Pete Chapman, 2013). Typically, there are several techniques for the same data
mining problem. Some techniques have specific requirements on the form of data. Therefore,
going back to the data preparation phase is often necessary.
5. Evaluation

It covers the evaluation of the model in the context of the business success criteria. Once one or
more models have been built that appear to have high quality based on whichever loss functions
have been selected, these need to be tested to ensure they generalize against unseen data and that
all key business issues have been sufficiently considered. The end result is the selection of the
model which is approved (Julian Clinton, 2013).

6. Deployment

Report of findings will be generated. During the planning and development of the deployment
procedure, a code representation of the model will be deployed into an operating system to score
or categorize new unseen data as it arises and to create a mechanism for the use of that new
information in the solution of the original business problem. Importantly, the code
representation must also include all the data preparation steps leading up to modeling so that the
model will treat new raw data in the same manner as during model development (Randy Kerber,
2012).
Business Intelligent System
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting
actionable information to help executives, managers and other corporate end users make
informed business decisions (Margaret Rouse, 2014).

BI adopted a wide variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to
collect data from internal systems and external sources; prepare it for analysis; develop and run
queries against that data; and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the
analytical results available to corporate decision-makers, as well as operational workers
(Margaret Rouse, 2014).

Business intelligence combines a broad set of data analysis applications, including ad hoc
analytics and querying, enterprise reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), mobile BI,
real-time BI, operational BI, cloud and software-as-a-service BI, open source BI, collaborative
BI, and location intelligence (Mary K.Pratt, 2017).

BI technology also includes data visualization software for designing charts and other
infographics (Paragon, 2013). Moreover, it uses for building BI dashboards and performance
scorecards that display visualized data on business metrics and key performance indicators in an
easy-to-grasp way.

Based on (Margaret Rouse, 2014), BI platforms are increasingly being used as front-end
interfaces for big data systems. Modern BI software typically offers flexible back ends, enabling
them to connect to a range of data sources. This, along with simple user interfaces, makes the
tools a good fit for big data architectures. Users can connect to a range of data sources, including
Hadoop systems, NoSQL databases, cloud platforms and more conventional data warehouses,
and can develop a unified view of their diverse data.
Importance of Business Intelligence
The potential benefits of business intelligence tools include accelerating and improving decision-
making, optimizing internal business processes, increasing operational efficiency, driving new
revenues and gaining competitive advantage over business rivals (Paragon, 2017). BI systems
can also help companies identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be
addressed.

BI data can include historical information stored in a data warehouse, as well as new data
gathered from source systems as it is generated, enabling BI tools to support both strategic and
tactical decision-making processes (Joshua Kennon, 2018).

Initially, BI tools were primarily used by data analysts and other IT professionals who ran
analyses and produced reports with query results for business users. Increasingly, however,
business executives and workers are using BI platforms themselves, thanks partly to the
development of self-service BI and data discovery tools and dashboards (Rose, 2016).

OLAP
Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a system that allows users to analyze data, from a variety
of sources, while offering multiple paradigms, or perspectives (Keith D. Foote, 2017). Databases
configured for OLAP use a multidimensional data model, supporting complex analysis and ad
hoc queries.

OLAP supports three basic operations which are consolidation, drill-down, slicing and dicing.
Consolidation involves combining data that can be stored and processed in multiple ways. For
example, all branch auto sales can be totaled by the auto sales manager, as a way to anticipate
sales trends. On the other hand, the drill-down technique supports navigating through, and
researching, the details. People can view the auto sales by color, style, or gas consumption.
Slicing and dicing lets people take out (slice) specific data on the OLAP cube, and view (dice)
those slices from different perspectives (Data Science 101, 2014).
Data Warehouse
Data Warehouses started becoming popular in the 1980s, as businesses began using in-house
Data Analysis solutions on a regular basis. Prior to Data Warehousing, a significant amount of
redundancy was needed to provide different people in the decision-making process with useful
information. Data warehousing significantly cut the amount of time needed to access data. Data
traditionally stored in a number of locations, could now be stored in a single location.

The use of Data Warehouses also helped in developing the use of Big Data. Suddenly, a massive
amount of data, in a variety of forms (email, internet, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could be accessed
from a single data store, saving time and money, and accessing Business Information previously
unavailable. The potential of Data Warehouses for data-driven insights was huge. These insights
increased profits, detected fraud, and minimized losses (Keith D. Foote, 2017).

Principles of Business Intelligence

1. Symmetry

The architecture reflects the business processes. This principle helps in creating an overall
picture of the business processes and a single source of the truth. It also ensures that the Business
Intelligence system seamlessly attunes with both the information needs and the challenges of the
business operations (Daan Van Beek, 2013).

2. Granularity

Data are submitted as detailed as possible and display the exact same granularity as the data in
the source system(s). This principle increases the testability and verifiability of data and
information in reports (Daan Van Beek, 2013). It also allows for detailed reports because no
information is lost. Information will be lost if concentrated rather than detailed data are
submitted (at a higher level).
 3. Synchronization

The refresh rate of data in both the data warehouse and reports should coincide with the
regularity and frequency of events in the relevant business processes. This prevents the
organization from missing out on important events.

4. Maintainability and scalability

The calculations, the intelligence and the logic behind KPI’s, measured values and dimensions
are preferably recorded in one and the same place – thus also on one single platform. This greatly
improves maintainability and scalability.

5. Flexibility

When we fill the Business Intelligence system, we usually include relevant surrounding and
adjacent data from the source systems so that users can create as many meaningful combinations
of indicators and dimensions as possible. This increases both the power and possibilities of the
analysis function within the organization.
Types of BI Tools

1. Power BI
Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive
visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, where end users can create
reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on information technology staff
or database administrators.

2. Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is a
creative launching pad that users can use to view and edit nearly any kind of code, and then
debug, build, and publish apps for Android, iOS, Windows, the web, and the cloud. Visual
Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, and Windows
Forms. It contains built-in tools like a code profiler, forms designer for
building GUI applications. It accepts plug-ins that enhance the functionality at almost every level
and which provide convenience for users.

3. SQL Server Management Tool (SSMS)

SQL Server Management Studio is a software application first launched with Microsoft that is
used for configuring, managing, and administering all components within Microsoft SQL Server.
The tool includes both script editors and graphical tools which work with objects and features of
the server. A central feature of SSMS is the Object Explorer, which allows the user to browse,
select, and act upon any of the objects within the server. It also shipped a separate Express
edition that could be freely downloaded, however recent versions of SSMS are fully capable of
connecting to and manage any SQL Server Express instance. Microsoft also incorporated
backwards compatibility for older versions of SQL.
BI Solution
1. Data source view

Diagram above is the data source view of my project. It contains 12 tables from the Floap inc
data source.
 2. Cube structure

The following is the cube structure that contains the dimensions and measures for the project. It
contains 7 dimensions and 12 measures. The dimension includes Date, Geography, Promotion,
Reseller, Employee, Product and Currency. The measures contains revision number, order
quantity, unit price, extended price, unit price discount percentage, discount amount, product
standard cost, total product cost, sales amount, tax amount, freight and reseller sales count.
 3. Dimension usage

The following page contains the dimensions, key attributes and measure groups for analytical
purposes of my project.
 4. Dimension attributes and hierarchies

The diagram above is the dimension attributes with hierarchies to structure and organize the data in a
meaningful way. For example, in the product category, there are 4 levels, which includes category, sub-
category, product name, and product id.
 5. Calculations

The following is the calculations defined in the project. It contains reseller gross profit, gross profit
margin and discount percentage. Calculations enables users to create calculated members, named
sets, and other multidimensional expressions calculations for business purposes.
 6. KPI

Key Performance indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is
achieving key business objectives. For this project I used reseller revenue as my KPI. It consist
of value expression, goal expression, and status expression.
BI Reports

Sales Overview

Diagram above is the sales overview of Floap Inc. It contains chart and reports regarding the
business of Floap Inc over the past 3 years. For example, KPI, calculations, sales regions, sales
category, sales promotions, order quantity by currency and etc.
Sales Amount by State Province Name

The following map represents the sales amount by state of each country. The map can be drill
down to country -> State -> City on any specific region that the user selected. Based on the map,
we can see that most of the sales are happening in USA while there are potentials growth for
sales in other countries. The company should focus more on the quality control of products in
USA compared to other countries as USA is the main source of income for the company.
Sales Amount by Calendar Year and Category

Based on report above, it shows that the sales of the company are increasing gradually from time
to time. In year 2013, the company achieved the highest sales revenue with total of 36 mil sales
amount. The most popular products sold by the company is bikes while accessories remains the
lowest demand for over the period of 3 years.
Discount Amount by Promotion Type

The following diagram displays the discount amount by promotion type. It is showed that new
products receive the most promotions (223.6k) when it is launched to the market. Besides that,
discontinued products also received large amount of discount to attract customers to purchase
their product at a lower price.
Order Quantity by Currency Name

The diagram shows the order quantity by currency name. US dollar represent the majority of
other currencies due to most sales are located at USA. It shows that US people has higher
purchasing power compared to other countries. Canadian Dollar place second in terms of order
quantity and sales.
Income Statement

Sales revenue is the amount of income that a company receives from a particular period of time.
In this case, Floap Inc. made a total of 80.45 million revenue in their overall sales for the past 3
years.

Gross profit is the profit that the company makes after deducting its operating cost and cost of
goods sold. Floap Inc. made a total of 470.48k of gross profit in total sales, which is quite low
for a sales revenue of 80.5M. This indicates that the company are selling their product for a price
which is too low to generate enough profit for the business. The company should fix their pricing
problem of their products by increasing the price overall to gain more profit to grow their
business.
Conclusion

In a nutshell, business intelligence plays an important role in today’s era of globalization. It can
aid in improving business models and strategies of companies in many ways. For example,
accelerating and improving decision-making, optimizing internal business processes, increasing
operational efficiency, driving new revenues and gaining competitive advantage over business
rivals and identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed. Besides
that, by creating dashboard and reports with BI tools, it can also identify potential trends and
growth opportunities of a particular company to improve and grow their business.

While doing this assignment, I had gained essential knowledge about business intelligence and
how a business works. I also learned how to use BI tools to create dashboards and visualizations
and present it with a business mindset. These knowledge will definitely help me in my future.
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