CHAPTER 11 - Building a Customer-Centric Organization (Customer Relationship Management)

  Why is it important for any company to use CRM strategies to manage customer information?

~ CRM technologies can help organizations answer tough questions such as who are their best customers and which of their products are the most profitable.

~ CRM solutions make organizational business processes more intelligent. This is achieved by understanding customer behavior and preferences, then realigning product and service offerings and related communications to make sure they are synchronized with customer needs and preferences. If you do not know and understand your customers then they might not be your customers for long.

 If the virtual world is the first point of contact between a company and its customers, how might that transform the entire shopping experience?

~ The virtual world could become the first point of contact between companies and customers and could transform the whole experience, writes Jo Best on Silicon.com.

~ Some companies believe Second Life could one day become a first point of contact for customers. Like many other big brands, PA Consulting has its own offices in Second Life and has learn that simply having an office to answer customer queries is not enough. Real people, albeit behind avatars, must be staffing the offices – in the same way having a website is not enough if there isn’t a call centre to back it up when a would-be customer wants to speak to a human being. In future, the consultants believe call centres could one day ask customers to follow up a phone call with them by moving the query into a virtual world and hanging around in Second Life is more fun than being stuck on hold. 

~ However, currently Second Life and its imitators remain relatively niche in usage terms and have their own technology boundaries – not all consumers, particularly the older community, have the tech savvy or indeed the hardware necessary to make use of virtual worlds.

Chapter 10: Supply Chain Management

Learning Outcomes

List and describe the components of a typical supply chain.

Supplier’s Supplier, Supplier, Manufacturer, Distributor, Retailer, Customer,  Customer’s customer.

Define the relationship between decision making and supply chain management.

SCM enhances decision making. Collecting, analyzing, and distributing transactional information to all relevant parties, SCM systems help all the different entities in the supply chain work together more effectively. SCM systems provide dynamic holistic views of organizations.  Users can “drill down” into detailed analyses of supply chain activities in a process analogous to DSS. Without SCM systems, organizations would be unable to make accurate and timely decisions regarding their supply chain.

Describe the four changes resulting from advances in IT that are driving supply chains.

Although people have been talking about the integrated supply chain for a long time, it has only been recently that advances in information technology have made it possible to bring the idea to life and truly integrate the supply chain. Visibility, consumer behaviour  competition, and speed are a few of the changes resulting from advances in information technology that are driving supply chains.

Summarize the best practices for implementing a successful supply chain management system.

The following are the SCM industry best practices:

Make the sale to suppliers - A large part of any SCM system extends beyond the organization to the suppliers.  Since the organization has very little control over anything external to itself, these pieces are typically the most complicated.Be sure suppliers are on board with the benefits that the SCM system will provide to ease SCM implementation difficulties.

Wean employees off traditional business practices - If the organization cannot convince people that using the SCM software is worthwhile, the employees will probably find a way around using the software.

Ensure the SCM system supports the organizational goals - Be sure to select SCM software that supports organizational goals and strategies.

Deploy in Incremental phases and measure and communicate success - Designing the deployment of the SCM system in incremental phases is the most successful deployment method.The BIG BANG approach – implementing everything at once – fails 90 percent of the time.Be future oriented - An SCM system, like all systems, must scale to meet future demands.

CHAPTER 9 - Enabling The Organization ( Decision Making)

CHAPTER 9 - Enabling The Organization ( Decision Making)

Categories of Artificial Intelligence systems are:

 EXPERT SYSTEM 

Expert system are computed advisory programs that imitated the reasoning process of experts in solving difficult problem, human experience is transferred to the expert system and users can access the expert system for specific advice.

Example of Al system

NEURAL NETWORKS

A neural network also called an artificial neural network , is a category of AL that attempts to emulate the way the human brain work. Also consider a real estate appraiser whose job is to predict the sale price of residential houses. As with the Bank Loans example, the input pattern consists of a group of numbers.For example,number of bedrooms, number of stories, floor area, age of construction, neighbourhood prices, size of lot, and distance to schools. This problem is similar to the Bank Loans example, because it has many non-linearities, and is subject to millions of possible inputs patterns. The difference here is that the output prediction will consist of a calculated value the selling price of the house. It is possible to train the neural network to simulate the opinion of an expert appraiser, or to predict the actual selling price. 

  

GENETIC ALGORITHMS

A genetic algorithm is an artificial intelligence system that mimics the evolutionary survival of the fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem. An artificial intelligent system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem.It essentially an optimizing system, it finds the combination of inputs that give the best outputs.Useful when search space very large or too complex for analytic treatment.In each iteration (generation) possible solutions or individuals represented as strings of numbers.

INTELLIGENT AGENTS

is an autonomous entity which observes through sensors and acts upon an environment using actuators  and directs its activity towards achieving goals . Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals. They may be very simple or very complex, a reflex machine such as a thermostat is an intelligent agent, as is a human being, as is a community of human beings working together towards a goal.

CHAPTER 8 -> Accessing Organizational Information (Data Warehouse)

1  Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organization.

The primary purpose of data warehouses and data marts are to perform analytical processing or OLAP

The insights into organizational information that can be gained from analytical processing are instrumental in setting strategic directions and goals

2  Compare the multidimensional nature of data warehouses (and data marts) with the two-dimensional nature of databases

Databases contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables, which means that you can only ever view two dimensions of information at one time.  In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows.  Each layer in a data warehouse or data mart represents information according to an additional dimension. Dimensions could include such things as products, promotions, stores, category, region, stock price, date, time, and even the weather.  The ability to look at information from different dimensions can add tremendous business insight.

3  Identify the importance of ensuring the cleanliness of information throughout an organization 

An organization must maintain high-quality information in the data warehouse

Information cleansing and scrubbing is a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information

Without high-quality information the organization will be unable to make good business decisions

4  Explain the relationship between business intelligence and a data warehouse.

Many of the tool vendors who sell their products or software call it business Intelligence software rather than Data warehousing software. so what is it? 

Business Intelligence is a term commonly associated with data warehousing. Business Intelligence is a generalized term where a company initiates various activities to gather today's market information which also includes about their competitor. Today's business Intelligence systems are contrasted to more classical way of information gathering in mining and crunching the data in the most optimal manner. In short we can say BI simplifies information discovery and analysis. 

In this way the company will have a competitive advantage of business and intelligently using the available data in strategic and effective decision making. it has the ability to bring disparate data under one roof  with a meaningful information and ready for analysis.

so what has Data warehousing to do with Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to make decisions on. A data warehousing (or data mart) system is the backed  or the infrastructural, component for achieving business intelligence. Business intelligence also includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as well as unstructured data.

Example, data warehousing. All the source data from disparate sources are used to load/Stage data. Different sources can be flat files, another database or some other process. The starting point of the Data warehouse should extract the data in order to load into its environment.This is extracting. This data may not be the expected format or size. your business demands are different or your organization business requirements are different. So the business process has to modify the data or better word is to transform the incoming data to meet requirements and objectives. This is called Transformation. 

Once every slicing and dicing of the data is done along with applied business rules, this data is ready for loading into the target tables. This process is called Loading. So overall till now we have done Extraction, Transformation and Loading. In short we call this ETL. There are lot of tools available in today's market which does help in achieving the ETL process. Once this data is loaded in to the database, this is ready for next processing. We call that database as Data warehouse database. 

The next process could be building of data marts or directly reporting from it. There are lot of tools or software available for reporting/analysis. Some call it business reporting or analysis tool. But if you see the whole process has intelligence involved in business. we can call this or the gurus call it Data warehousing and the system involved from end to end is called business intelligence system. 

CHAPTER 7 -> Storing Organizational Information (Database)

CHAPTER 7 -> Storing Organizational Information (Database)

1. FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF THE RELATIONAL DATABASE MODEL

A relational database is a core, a system for storing and using data based upon the relationships among the elements of data. Different as databases may be in size, they are generally always structured according to one of three database models:

Relational

 Nowadays, new installations of database management systems are almost exclusively of the relational type. Organizations that already have a major investment in hierarchical or network technology may add to the existing model, but groups that have no need to maintain compatibility with “legacy systems” nearly always choose the relational model for their databases.

Hierarchical

 Hierarchical databases are aptly named because they have a simple hierarchical structure that allows fast data access. They suffer from redundancy problems and a structural inflexibility that makes database modification difficult.

Network

 Network databases have minimal redundancy but pay for that advantage with structural complexity. A cube is one way to illustrate relations among data as it helps to visualize data intersections. While it is easiest for us to picture a three-dimensional cube, a relational database stores data in many dimensions. 

We can think of dimensions as the entry points into the data or those business concepts we will use to slice and dice our data. In some organizations, dimensions are referred to as entities.

Many customers will buy many products in many stores at many times. We will call this type of data relationship a many-to-many relationship. In many-to-many relationships we use dimensional keys to organize the data. Look for the keys in the dimensional model at above.

-Each dimension has a single primary key. The primary key is unique to each row or record in our database and its value should not change over time.

-A primary key is often a consecutive or random number assigned to the record as it enters the database. 

-A primary key can also be made up of components of other fields in the table.

-The primary key is used for indexing the table to make it more efficient to search, sort, link and perform other operations on the data. 

-If we review the market dimension we find that each store key is unique. no two stores can have the same store key. Although it might seem that we could use store name as a unique means of identifying each store, we have  different stores with different addresses, states, regions, etc.

- When these keys appear in the fact table, they are referred to as foreign keys. In the Sales Fact Table, the foreign key is no longer unique. It may appear many times or not at all. 

- So the foreign keys in the fact table must have counterparts in the dimension tables to which it refers. This requirement of relational databases is called referential integrity.

- If you spend a great deal of time talking with data modelers you may come across a few more terms having to do with keys, such as composite keys and concatenated keys. Every fact table in a relational database has a composite key. 

- This is the primary key for the fact table and it is usually made up of a combination of the foreign keys maintained in the fact table. These foreign keys are concatenated (linked together into a single entry) into a primary key for the fact table

2.THE ADVANTAGES OF RELATIONAL DATABASE

·       >  increased flexibility      

·        .> increased information security   

·        > increased information integrity

·         >reduced information redundancy

·        > increased scalability and performance

     3.DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM & RELATIONSHIP WITH WEBSITE

   - A Database Management System (DBMS) is a set of programs that enables you to store,modify, and extract information from a database.

- It also provides users with tools to add, delete, access, modify, and analyze data stored in one location.

-  A group can access the data by using query and reporting tools that are part of the DBMS or by using application programs specifically written to access the data. 

- DBMS also provide the method for maintaining the integrity of stored data, running security and users access, and recovering information if the system fails

- Many DBMS also include a graphics component that enables you to output information in the form of graphs and charts. Database and database management system are essential to all areas of business, they must be carefully managed.

Consider for example, a company selling sports cars. A database is created with information on each of its currently available cars e.g. make, model, engine details, year, a photograph, etc. A visitor to the website clicks on Porsche, the visitor enters the price range that they are interested in and hits 'Go'. The visitor is presented with information on available Porsche cars in their price range and an invitation to purchase or request more information from the company. The company has the ability to add new cars to the database, remove them or modify existing entries - this is achieved via a secure administration area on the website.

     4.WHY ORGANIZATION WOULD WANT TO INTEGRATE ITS DATABASE?

 Data integration refers to the organization’s inventory of data and information assets as well as the tools, strategies and philosophies by which fragmented data assets are aligned to support business goals.

company want to integrate its database because they will connect,communicate,dealing and having relation with its customer everyday. Everyday its customers will open the webpage and search anything appear on the page. Therefore, if the product still available or not available the supplier must inform the customers immediately. Publish the information on the web page to make the customers realize that the product exist or not in the market. Then, when the customers got information they will not too disappointed and not waiting too long. Customers satisfy, the business relationship between sellers and customers will be good.