The Application Of Business Intelligence In Retail

Information explosion promotes social progress, and at the same time, it brings a large amount of data and more intense competition among enterprises. To find out business opportunities is fundamental to make enterprises stay in an invincible position. The value of information is that it is the foundation for enterprises to become a market-leader and to seize the business opportunities. Also it is the basis for decision-makers to analyze the market situation and make a decision. No one can ignore the power of information.Retail industry compared with other industries has its own characters: data is more chaotic and more complex, the amount is extremely large. How could we change these messy and massive data to valuable information? Business intelligence plays an important role as a bridge to implement the goal. Competition between several biggest retail companies of the world is extremely intense. Facing the data increasing everyday, which likes flood, to obtain useful information for decision-makers to deploy their market strategy will be the very important task.The paper is based on business intelligence systems project for large foreign retailers, introduced the theory of business intelligence and structure and characteristics of the project. In the theoretical part, it describes the development of business intelligence and the three core technology---Data Warehouse, On-Line Analysis Processing, Data Mining. In project analysis part, it describes the process of this project, including business requirement analysis, the framework of whole project and the implement of ETL, Data Warehouse and OLAP. On current market, these is a few compatibility system which can satisfy multi-customers’ requirements. This paper focuses on the characteristics of the project---Different combinations of suppliers and retailers to implement a system which is compatible and multi-function. An one-time developed to meet the requirements of multiple customers, which is more reasonable than secondary development of ERP. Also, it saves the cost for maintenance. Finally, in the project summary part, analyze the problems of current project that will be encountered in the future, and the future of business intelligence.