Business Intelligence Turns Dick’S Sporting Goods Into A Winner

Business Intelligence Turns Dick’S Sporting Goods Into A Winner

1. What problems did Dick’s face with its data tracking and reporting? How did they affect decision making and business performance?
>> The company has 300 stores in 34 states but has no central repository for company information which made it difficult to tell whether or not a particular report is accurate. The company has no unified database that employees can access; employees kept their own analyses of sales and inventory in their own department and on their own machines. Analysis on specific item performance regionally or in specific store was impossible since their database was not suited for this kind of reports. Because of these problems, the company is not able to come up with a good decision making on how they can improve their business performance because of poor reports.

2. What did the company do to remedy those problems?
>> Recognizing all the problems above, the company used a new system from MiscroStrategy and a database from Oracle (Oracle 8i) which has customized capabilities to extract data and the ability to transform different business requirements. The new system was able to track sale of apparel and equipment in each store and by region.
 
3. Was MicroStrategy an appropriate selection for Dick’s? Why or why not?
>> Yes the use of Microstategy was a good selection; the software was a key element of Dick’s overhaul. The software has the ability to work with relational database via relational online analytical processing (ROLAP). In ROLAP, data are accessed directly from data warehouse. It dynamically consolidates data for ad hoc and decision support analyses and scale to a large number of business analysis perspective.
With this new software, processing of reports just take minutes that once took hours because of system interaction with the master database which consist of multiple terabytes of data. After the implementation of new system, earnings have doubled while their profit margin has been close to double that of their...