Usage Of Business Intelligence In Woolworths Retail Organization

Choosing a Theme or Industry or Organization

Woolworths is an Australia based retail company. Brad Banducci is the current CEO of the company. The first store under the brand name Woolworths was opened in 1924 in Sydney. The company offers a variety of food products, clothing, homeware as well as financial services. It is present in Australia, New Zealand as well as India. Woolworths is one of the behemoth player of retail industry in Australia and scope of usage of business intelligence is much high as they operate in international market as well. With the help of business intelligence, organization would be able to manage its international as well as domestic operations in an effective manner. Apart from this, business intelligence would also help the organization to expand its market share along with enhancing customer base, revenues, profitability.

Woolworths’ stores need a varied service system and diverse working situations in order to enhance the efficiency of their employees in terms of attainment of organizational desired goals and objectives. Woolworths appoint full-time, part-time as well as contract-based employees in relation with the requirement of business. Along with this, Woolworths believes in work-life harmony which encourages employee motivation and it helps the organization to develop its positive image amongst the employees. Scope for Woolworths contains sharecroppers who cultivate and manufacture goods, truck drivers who transport goods and deliver grownup foodstuff to the different superstore, administrators that manage stock entering stores, store executive who controls business operations (Woolworth and Phinney, 2012).

Primary competitor of Woolworths Limited is Coles in Australia and they both have made Australian retail market as duopoly type of market. Both of these companies have covered approximately 80% market share in the Australian market (Dos Santos, 2011). With regards to this, organization has decided to introduce business intelligence for overtaking market share of Coles which is the major competitor for the objective of gaining leading position in the target market. Business intelligence will also cover the topic of introduction of automation system which will ultimately help the business to enhance its efficiency.  

Marketing and Sales

• Advertising and Ordering terms.
• The marketing team of Woolworths is sufficient enough to promote their products and services with the objective of enhancing its market share in the target market.
• Each of these groups is liable for their elevations, deferring, alternatives of products etc.
• Every group works carefully with the advertising division to arrange publicity.
• Every group coordinates with sellers (Abunar and Zerban, 2016).
• Information is examined by all the groups to search into the things such as efficiency of a definite sale or the sale of a definite product in a particular area(Abunar and Zerban, 2016).
• With the help of business intelligence, organization would easily be able to target its suitable customer segments.
• Business intelligence will lead the organization to target its suitable customer segments with modern approaches of advertisement and promotion.
• Attainment of targets would easily be estimated with the help of business intelligence and it also helps the organization to analyse its performance (Richards et al., 2012).  

• Supports in promotional activities of Woolworths: – Business Intelligence is very important for small, medium as well as for large businesses in relevance with executing their functions to figure out the requirement of appropriate marketing strategy. It can interpret into analytics intelligence where trades can base conclusions on the compact study, information, and evidence, instead of perception and supposition(Zikmund et al., 2013). Along with this, business intelligence will help the organization with relevant historical data and demand for the particular product in different market segments. With the help of this information, organization would easily be able to develop its marketing and promotional activities to attract those target markets.
• Business Intelligence convert raw data collected into meaningful information:- Today business intelligence is very necessary. The data collected is converted into meaningful information as per the requirement of business functionalities. Business intelligence helps the organization to convert the collected data into an appropriate manner through which the desired business goals could be accomplished (Zikmund et al., 2013).
• Business Intelligence helps in to drive income from the company functions:- With the help of business intelligence, the organization could easily execute its functions along with generating high income. This is because functions would be executed in an appropriate manner along with the motive of deriving customer service. If promotional activities will be made exactly as per the data collected and on the basis of particular customer segment, then it will be easy for organization to attain desired goals and objectives.
• Business Intelligence helps in customizing sales policies and achieves objectives: – Business intelligence helps business enterprises to evaluate business conditions in relevance to working in any situation. Mainly marketing team and business analytics team collects data to reach out a decision for the adaptation of particular strategy in order to execute business functionalities in a particular situation in an effective manner. Along with this, business intelligence is capable enough to ascertain the challenges and opportunities in relation to a particular business situation. Thus, organizational management could adopt appropriate strategies in order to deal with those challenges along with gaining positive outcomes (Anandarajan, Anandarajan, and Srinivasan, 2012).
• Business intelligence helps in constructing an appropriate sales plan: – Business intelligence helps in taking decisions and along with analysing the requirement of the particular strategy as per the situation. Business intelligence is capable enough to determine the business’ requirements as well as market conditions through which the appropriate sales strategies would be designed in relevance with attainment of desired objectives (Anandarajan, Anandarajan and Srinivasan, 2012).

• Advertisings (including vouchers): – Business intelligence uses data gathered from different platforms to match them with the buying pattern of consumers which ultimately helps the retailers to fulfill the consumer’s requirement. Therefore it aids the former to construct and well- organized advertisements and faithful promotional campaigns and also supports to construct marketing strategies for the objective of enhancing organizational performance(McBride, 2014).
• Shopping Targeting:- Business intelligence supports retailers to form a reliable image amongst their customers. Business intelligence helps in gathering consumer’s demand, wants, their buying pattern and trends followed in the market with the objective of ascertaining appropriate strategies for targeting appropriate customer segments (McBride, 2014).
• Promotion Organization:- Business intelligence supports in marketing and promotional campaigns. Woolworths uses both traditional as well as non-traditional promotional strategies for the objective of approaching multiple customer segments. Every customer segment has separate requirements and in order to fulfil every customer segment’s demands and wants, Woolworths develop separate marketing and promotional strategy (Moro, Cortez and Rita, 2015).  
• Pricing:- Pricing is one of the primary factors for success and failure of a product. With regards to this, Woolworths uses business intelligence to determine pricing strategies used by its competitors in order to decide the prices of their products. Generally, Woolworths follow fair pricing technique in order to differentiate its image from its competitors along with the objective of enhancing demand for their products and services.
• Inventory Management:- Inventory management is another useful and pivotal function for a business enterprise. With regards to this, Woolworths uses business intelligence in order to maintain a record of their inventory as its product offering is huge. Business intelligence helps the organization to place order automatically to suppliers when inventory level goes down which ultimately helps the organization to boost up its efficiency along with fulfilling target customers’ demand constantly (Moro, Cortez and Rita, 2015).

• The rise in Competition: – With the increased usage of the internet and the introduction of globalisation in business markets, rivalry in every industry is increasing. With regards to this, it is necessary for every business firm to adopt unique measures and advanced techniques for developing a separate image from its competitors. Woolworths uses business intelligence in order to find the latest tools through which organizational existing and potential customer’s demands could be fulfilled along with attracting new customer segments(Banerjee and Mishra, 2017).
• Rise in consumer beliefs:- Consumer demands are not constant and they vary as per the trends and business market conditions. It is necessary for an organization to produce and delivers only those products which are trending and most demanded to attain better outcomes. In order to analyse the target customer’s demands, the business intelligence tool is sufficient as well as effective (Banerjee and Mishra, 2017).
• Retail-FMCG interplanetary underlying forces: – Supermarket industry has been charged with the introduction of globalisation. Though business organizations have been able to expand its businesses in international markets but still, they lag in fulfilling demands of its customers (Bala, 2012).
• Influence on policies and procedures:- Due to the international expansion of businesses, organizations are required to build policies on the basis of different marketing conditions. Woolworths Limited uses business intelligence to amend its policies for different marketing conditions in relation to the upliftment of organizational performance (Bala, 2012).

• Business intelligence is used to develop precise and appropriate business strategies in order to enhance organizational performance along with the objective of eliminating waste. Managers could also form different and effective strategies on the basis of the market situation as well as on the basis of organizational policies, rules, and regulations. Thus, decisions taken with the help of business intelligence are genuine as well as appropriate as per current marketing trends and situation. It helps the businesses to attain its desired goals along with enhancing its efficiency(Rajteri?, 2010).
• Business intelligence helps business entities to recognise opportunities which could be availed for the objective of gaining positive outcomes. Organizations could also determine the facts and figures with the help of business intelligence to undertake decisions for executing tasks. This will develop new offers to adjust to the present market situation along with enhancing customer satisfaction (Rajteri?, 2010).
• Business intelligence is also useful for highlighting organizational KPIs and other unique propositions through which exclusive image could be developed amongst the target customers.
• Business intelligence leads to introduce automation through which numerous tasks could be performed in an appropriate manner along with uplifting organizational performance (Yeoh and Koronios, 2010).
• Business intelligence supports in inventory management. This helps in maintaining an appropriate level of stock, placing an order with suppliers, etc. through which customer satisfaction could be attained.
• Resource allocation is another task which could be performed in an appropriate manner with business intelligence. This results in uplifting organizational performance(Yeoh and Koronios, 2010).          

References

Abunar, S.M. and Zerban, A.M. (2016) Enhancing Accounting Information Systems to Facilitate Supply Chain Management between Supermarkets/Suppliers: The case of Saudi Arabia. Journal of Accounting & Marketing, 5(2), pp.1-7.

Anandarajan, M., Anandarajan, A. and Srinivasan, C.A. eds. (2012) Business intelligence techniques: a perspective from accounting and finance. Germany: Springer Science & Business Media.

Bala, P.K. (2012) Improving inventory performance with clustering based demand forecasts. Journal of Modelling in Management, 7(1), pp.23-37.

Banerjee, M. and Mishra, M. (2017) Retail supply chain management practices in India: A business intelligence perspective. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 34, pp.248-259.

Dos Santos, M.A. (2011) Minimizing the business impact on the natural environment: a case study of Woolworths South Africa. European Business Review, 23(4), pp.384-391.

McBride, N. (2014) Business intelligence in magazine distribution. International Journal of Information Management, 34(1), pp.58-62.

Moro, S., Cortez, P. and Rita, P. (2015) Business intelligence in banking: A literature analysis from 2002 to 2013 using text mining and latent Dirichlet allocation. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(3), pp.1314-1324.

Rajteri?, I.H. (2010) Overview of business intelligence maturity models. Management: Journal of Contemporary Management Issues, 15(1), pp.47-67.

Richards, C., Lawrence, G., Loong, M. and Burch, D. (2012) A toothless chihuahua? The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, neoliberalism and supermarket power in Australia. Rural Society, 21(3), pp.250-263.

Woolworth, D.S. and Phinney, P. (2012) Creation of an architects’ companion booklet for ANSI 12.60 American National Classroom Acoustics Standard. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), pp.2046-2046.

Yeoh, W. and Koronios, A. (2010) Critical success factors for business intelligence systems. Journal of computer information systems, 50(3), pp.23-32.

Zikmund, W.G., Babin, B.J., Carr, J.C. and Griffin, M. (2013) Business research methods. Boston: Cengage Learning.