Home Depot

IS Business Intelligence, Decision Making and Problem Solving

Name

Northern Alberta Institute of Technology

Reporting systems can help retail stores analyse the data is essential for their continuity and success. This paper examines the different reporting systems and analysis that can help the organization gain some valuable information.

Reporting systems

Reporting systems represent one of the four categories of business intelligence systems. Reporting systems integrate data from multiple sources. In addition they process the data by sorting, grouping, summing, averaging, and comparing. It then formats the results into reports and delivers it to users. They can significantly improve the decision making process by delivering the right information to the right user at the right time.

Report - OLAP

One of the ways to develop a report is by using online analytic processing (OLAP) systems. An OLAP report consists of measures, facts, and dimensions. In an OLAP report measure is the data item of interest. Examples of measures can be total sales, average sales, and average costs. An OLAP report helps to drill down into the data. The report can be divided into different dimensions including the country, state or province, city and also different store types and their exact locations. Once the report is divided into different segments, each segment can then be observed and poorly selling models can be easily identified.

The major requirements for this report are division of stores via countries, province, city, product family. The product family can then be divided into different number of products by each brand and then further division into sales of each model of the brand and also the sales of the brand in total.

Cluster analysis

Cluster analysis assists is finding groups of similar customers from customer order and demographic data. It can take different group of customers and identify the common buying patterns between them. After the breakdown...