A Review of Data Analytics Adoption in Business Industry
Chong Fong Kim1 and Deshinta Arrova Dewi 1
1
Faculty of Information Technology, INTI International University,
Persiaran Perdana BBN, Putra Nilai,
71800 Nilai, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia.
[email protected] Abstract
This paper presents a review of data analytics adoption in various companies
from the different business industry. An introductory analysis on how these
companies solve problems encountered and relate their action plans with
business analytics and/or business intelligent solutions especially in Customer
Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and
Decision Support Systems (DSS). Many business organizations and
communities are finding and getting advantages from powerful knowledge by
analyzing the resource of data analytics. Data analytics actually is only part of
what big data can offers. By using analytics, an organization gets even greater
value in order to serve its customer better through changing how they think,
work and interact with them. Those new insights come from the powerful
knowledge of big data and resulted in powerful actions to gain competitive
advantages. Some companies manage to transform their business models by
driving growth in new sectors using new ways with the help of big data and its
analytics. This paper used three major companies in the study i.e. Starbucks,
Heineken N.V and Electronic Arts (EA). The studies found that all those
companies are able to meet their market supply and demands opportunities by
utilizing their past historical data in the data warehouse to understand the
underlying hidden trends and patterns that will enable them to make better
decisions.
Keywords
Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Big Data
Introduction
Rapid decision-making has become increasingly important over the past two
decades for productivity improvement. Studies show that through data
analytics, companies increasingly deliver value which includes three main parts
of the organization i.e. people, processes and technologies. In this view, data
analytics is powerful because it turns data into significant insights and drives
business decisions and actions accordingly. IBM Tech Trends Report in 2011
identified data analytics as one of the four major technology trends since the
year 2010 (Lim, Chen & Chen, 2013). Bloomberg Businessweek has reported
in 2011 that 97 percent of companies with revenues exceeding $100 million
were found to use some form of data and business analytics. Any organizations
with enterprise data analytics capabilities will establish a sound foundation of
high-quality, usable and integrated data (Wixom, Yen & Relich, 2018). This
data is delivered to business users via a diverse selection of data analytics tools
and techniques in data query, descriptive analytics and/or predictive analytics
software. Over time, eventually, organizations manage and evolve their data
analytics capabilities through IT and data governance mechanisms. Hence data
analytics is leading as it enables business users to identify perceptions from the
data, make decisions and solve important business problems. On top of that, it
triggers actions that generate a wide range of tangible and intangible business
value.
This paper focuses on the review of data analytic adoption in three big
companies that are well known in the world i.e. Starbucks Corporation,
Heineken N.V and Electronic Arts (EA). The selection of these companies
generally comes from the idea of “what people do in daily life” whereby the
majority of people ever drinks coffee, some of them drinks beer and some of
them watching the movies during leisure time. Hence, Starbucks is selected to
represent companies that mainly produce coffee. Heineken N.V is selected to
represent companies that produce beer. And Electronic Arts (EA) is selected to
represent companies that produce interactive games. These companies were
selected in these studies because they are using various techniques in big data
analytics as a solution to maximize their business values. In the next following
sections, the methodology and coverage of this paper are presented with results
and discussion.
Methodology
This section describes the research methodology that is designed and
implemented towards a comprehensive review in this paper. In order to gain
more understanding of how the different companies use various data analytics
techniques in generating actionable insights to solve the solutions they faced,
literature research on these was conducted and studied.
The authors designed the following research methodology (in figure 1)
to describe the flow of data gathering and analysis in this paper.
Descriptive Analytics
Predictive Analytics
Big data
Figure 1. Research Methodology
Results and Discussion
This section presents the findings of the three selected companies. Starbuck
company has been using HighJump software, an Internet-based supply chain
executive (SCE) to automate their product distribution within their network
(Peter, 2002). HighJump is selected due to software ability to offer supply chain
analytics module on top of its warehouse management and data collection
solutions (Peter, 2002). Besides that, Starbuck uses a website to gather opinions
from its customer in term of satisfaction and innovation (Marr, 2019).
Starbucks market planning team use the business intelligence tool developed by
Esri to evaluates massive amounts of data such as locations, demographics,
traffic patterns, and others in order to recommend a new store location and the
result of analysis even predicts the impact of the new store opening to the other
Starbucks locations (Marr, 2019). With the use of Big data and business
intelligence tool, Starbucks can leverage in many ways to improve customer
experience and to help direct marketing, sales, and business decisions. The big
data also allow Starbucks to cluster their customers based on characteristics to
provide customers, the better recommendation of products and offer.
As for Heineken N.V, they have been using a software called Sales
Force Automation (SFA) which is also known as Jeans system for their CRM.
This Jeans system offers an integrated and customized CRM tool, able to
automate and streamline sales inventory, forecasts, leads, performance, analysis
and also enable sales employee to get all the operational information such as
warehouse stock balance, outlet log files and a number of visits on their mobile
device. Heineken N.V. uses big data to determine their area’s sales and
understand when to make special competition and event to attract more
customers to boost sales. The company also analyze customer buying habits to
identify what drinks are sold quicker at certain times especially in providing
various promotion events the customers interested in and the data collected also
explained the reason why certain products are not selling well in a certain
period. As results, Heineken N.V volume has raised 7.7% ("Latest Reports",
2019).
Similar to both companies above, Electronic Arts (EA) has been using
IT and data analytics in their process. For Electronic Art Inc (EA), the usage of
big data and business intelligence techniques are significant to increase
advertising revenue, improve gameplay, and efficiently manage the user
experience. EA using big data for keeping a track of gameplay which helps
predict the performance of the play. These data will be further analyzed to turn
into business insights for the development team to understand how the players
interact with the games and to help them adjust on the game to enhance
gameplay experience and to retain the customers (Miller, 2012). As a large
company that produces games of AAA quality, mobile, and others, EA has its
own on-gaming service called Origin. Origin has been stated to collect the
users’ data for various reasons inclusive of descriptive and predictive analytics
("Turning Decision Making into a Right-Time Electronic Art with Informatica",
2018). Descriptive analytics benefit EA for checking the inventory, the amount
of average customer spends on the company per year and how much company
make for good. Predictive analytics benefit EA to identify patterns in data and
find the core relationship of products and customers from especially salesforce
in customer relationship management (CRM). According to Bradburn (2019),
Senior Director of Support Systems of EA, building a good gaming experience
is no longer enough. As the company business evolved, they need to provide a
richer experience to customers, build stronger relationships and able to capture
real-time feedback to support customer needs and demands.
Conclusions
The review in this paper has brought more insights and a clearer understanding
of how the three selected companies operate and the implementation of big data
analytics solutions have resolved the challenges faces to improve the business
operations. Thus, big data analytics also provide recommendations to the
companies to enhance their effectiveness and also them to make better
decisions.
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