1. What is business intelligence and analysis? Identify a real company and investigate their BI&A application. You should elaborate the BI&A project, software tools used, the benefits and values obtained by implementing the BI project.

The process using which an organization creates competitive differentiation and value by collecting, maintaining, organizing data and also by using analytics to examine, evaluate and investigate the data to drive decision making in a company is defined as business intelligence and analytics.

Unilever is one of world’s leading consumer brands . Unilever generates vast amount of data about its products from all around the world. SAP Business Objects Data Integrator is used to extract data, transform and load into an SAP business warehouse. The data warehouse feeds the data into Infocubes(data marts) and is made available to the end users. BI was delivered to the business managers within Unilever using a software called SAP Business Explorer( BEx) which connects to an InfoCube in BI and runs queries to store the data in Excel.

This project gave Unilever improved access to and integration of their business data from disparate sources. It also gave them a 360 degree visibility into their corporate activities. It also improved their collaboration and also communication with their customers, vendors and other business partners.

2. What is CRM ? How can BI facilitate CRM ? Answer the question by studying a real company using BI & A to support CRM.

Customer Relationship Management is an enterprise driven business strategy to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduce costs in order to improve the profits of the company. CRM integrates the data from different data sources with the organization to give one holistic view of the customers in real time. Business Intelligence solution can help report, analyze and graphically represent CRM data live from a data warehouse.

PLIVA is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Croatia. Its success is dependent on the sales team which works with hospitals and pharmacies. They implemented a single solution for BI and CRM to support their sales team. CRM solution offers advanced functionalities like marketing campaigns, cross-selling and sales support. The data between sales team and back office is constantly synchronized and thus the BI helps PLIVA to keep better track of how the sales team is performing. Secondary sales information is gathered from its distributors and the entire information from Business Intelligence system gives PLIVA a comprehensive overview of their sales on the ground. This integrated BI & CRM solution thus enables PLIVA to analyze their market and sales team performance which in turn provides greater agility in responding to changing market conditions.

3. What is big data ? What is big data analytics ? What are the challenges and opportunities for businesses with big data ?

Large pools of data that can be captured, organized, stored, communicated and analyzed and which is now a part of every sector and function of global economy is called Big Data. The process of uncovering hidden patterns, correlations and other useful information from this large pool of data in order to achieve competitive advantage over rival organizations is Big Data analytics. The primary goal of big data analytics is to help companies make better business decisions by enabling users to analyze huge volumes of data which is left untapped by conventional BI programs.

Challenges :
• Fetching real time data is a real problem.
• Timeliness – It takes longer time to analyze the large amounts of data.
• Privacy – Privacy of data is a huge concern as users have fears over inappropriate use of data.
• Scale – Managing rapidly increasing volumes of data is a huge challenge.
• Clouding – There is some uncertainty in the industry whether or not to upload the data to the cloud.