Business Intelligence in Consumer Goods
With a huge boom in the e-commerce industry, the customer is well-informed and has infinite options available under his thumb. Although, Aggregator apps help in increasing business visibility but also add to the cut-throat competition and this leaves the 'Consumer Goods Providers' to rely on consumer’s tendency to ‘pull’ products.
With ever-changing shopping trends and ever-increasing data, analytics comes as the only resort to find a way out of this maze.
Now let’s think of a situation, where business wants to identify the right price and discount point that maximizes sales lift and RoI. There are number of data points needed to figure this out:
- Historical Sales Data
- CRM Data
- Historical Promotional Data
- Inventory Data
Every business stores this data in some form or manner, but data itself pose a bigger challenge:
- Data is huge
- Data is heterogeneous
- Data needs to be accessed from all across
- Data is noisy
Once the company hops onto this roller coaster, the ride is full of jerks, starting from setting up the process till getting the fruitful results out. That’s where building a Business Intelligence solution helps:
- BI solution can answer the questions that matters the most for business like:
- What pricing and promotional strategy is most effective?
- Which floor plan will sell more designer apparels?
- When and how much to discount?
BI solutions are divided into various parts:
ETL
- Used to collate data from different sources
- Extract, Cleanse and Transform data to get useful insights
- Load transformed data in data warehouse
Data WareHouse
- Data Warehouse:This is where the data resides
- Number of views can be built depending upon the insight of end user’s interest. This is what makes OLAP systems different from OLTP, where OLAP is targeted to find the collective effect, while OLTP concentrates on transactional details
- Data security in order to protect the data from unauthorized access
Visualization
- Reports, graphs to clearly identify the trends and patterns
- Views specific to user groups and departments with restricted access
As per the latest survey, 85% of CIOs emphasize on BI solutions, while planning for IT Budget which signifies the importance for business to embark on the journey now.
If you have any queries, feedback or suggestions for us in regards to BI tools, implementation, building a reporting system from scratch or anything geek, we would love to hear from you! Write to us at enquiry@bluepi.in
Happy innovating!
This blog has been written by Aashu Aggarwal, one of our core Leadership Team's Member.

Aashu Aggarwal, Head, Bangalore Operations & Sales
Aashu is one of the rare sales people who’s still an enthusiastic coder at heart! She’s proficient at traditional goodies like Java, J2EE, Spring, RDBMS; along with new age technologies like MongoDB, Scala, Play, NodeJS, AngularJS, etc.
Often guided by the Mantra "Out of clutter, find simplicity", Aashu prefers employing simplistic approaches to wade through tough scenarios. When not hooked on to work (we don’t know when was the last time that happened), she likes to travel the world and capture it through the lens of her camera!