Retail Acumen is the new name for ARC-Retail.

Please visit our fantastic new website at

www.retailacumen.com

Business intelligence. What on earth does this mean? There is an assumption here that businesses have intelligence - well most of them do, even if they don't have access to it. Either way, Business intelligence, or BI as it is also known, is an overused phrase in today's IT focussed world. The original principles of taking the colossal volumes of data that modern retail organisations generate on a daily basis and turning that into useful decision making information can really be the key that unlocks the answers needed for survival and more importantly competitive advantage, agility, speed to market and profit growth.

It may sound simple but transforming data into useful and usable information is a critical skill and process both often neglected by "so called" experts. Understanding the meaning and basis of each simple data element is fundamental to the "single version of the truth" that can be created from a well implemented Business Intelligence solution. Herein is the opportunity to really enable decision making and causal analysis along side more traditional productionised reporting. Drilling down, up and across hierarchies, dimensions and attributes becomes possible for not just the power users and developers but for the day to day operational job-holders. It has always been said, knowledge is power...

Formerly the exclusive territory of the mainframe, processing large volumes of data has now become possible on the everyday windows server platform. With the launch of SQL server 2005 and SharePoint server Microsoft have put the tools for not only data integration, but also the presentation of information, analysis and reporting in the reach of all retailers with scalability to cope with the largest.

ARC Retail has already developed extensive experience in using these tools in a large retail environment, to understand the decision support needs, help define the KPIs, to build the data storage model and interfaces to key systems in a process oriented approach. Reports can be delivered by email, to office applications or securely via the web (or intranet) whilst the extraction, transformation and load (ETL) includes tools to exclude flawed input data for data cleansing when necessary.

The real value of the SQL server 2005 solution only becomes visible once this is in place. The ability for the administrator or users to rapidly change their reporting to focus day by day and tune into the more pertinent current issues and opportunities, to deliver answers whilst they can still make a difference, and with an acceptable level of performance and response time is something that retailers' IT departments have struggled to deliver for years.