Big Data and
Management
With
the explosion of Big Data, many managers are wondering how they can get in on a
piece of the action. The article says
Big Data is important to management because they can measure business
performance and make adjustments. You have to be able to measure before you can
fix.
Booksellers
in physical stores could always track which books sold and which did not. But
with online sales, booksellers are now able to get a better understanding of the
customers and their purchasing habits. They can not only track what they bought,
but what they looked at, how much they were influenced by page layouts and
promotions, and how they were swayed by reviews. Traditional retailers were put
out of business because they could not keep up with these new algorithms.
This
new online retail standard has set the bar high for new online companies. People expect new digital companies to
accomplish things that were unheard of a decade ago. The article says that these powerful tools
can be used for management decisions. “We can make better
predictions and smarter decisions. We can target more-effective interventions,
and can do so in areas that, so far have been dominated by gut and intuition
rather than by data and rigor.”**
The
article separates Big Data and Analytics by highlighting two key differences
between the two. Velocity and Volume
are the two big differences between Analytics and Big Data.
Volume: As of 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day,
and that number is doubling every 40 months or so. More data cross the internet
every second than were stored in the entire internet just 20 years ago. This
gives companies an opportunity to work with many petabyes of data in a single
data set—and not just from the internet. For instance, it is estimated that
Walmart collects more than 2.5 petabytes of data every hour from its customer
transactions. A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes, or the equivalent of about
20 million filing cabinets’ worth of text. An exabyte is 1,000 times that
amount, or one billion gigabytes.**
Velocity. For many applications, the
speed of data creation is even more important than the volume. Real-time or
nearly real-time information makes it possible for a company to be much more
agile than its competitors. For instance, our colleague Alex “Sandy” Pentland
and his group at the MIT Media Lab used location data from mobile phones to
infer how many people were in Macy’s parking lots on Black Friday—the start of
the Christmas shopping season in the United States. This made it possible to
estimate the retailer’s sales on that critical day even before Macy’s itself
had recorded those sales. Rapid insights like that can provide an obvious
competitive advantage to Wall Street analysts and Main Street managers. **
I think this is another blog that talking about the big data application in the supply chain. As I said before. Wal-Mart is one of the best companies that use the big data technology. Actually,as we known, except Wal-Mart, Apple and eBay also have some of biggest data warehouses as we have ever seen. In the era of big data become more and more popular and important, many companies have introduced big data technology. Let’s see how the customers use the company’s analytics software. “Teradata’ approach” is a technology to handle big data workloads and make no mistake about the company’s clout. Now the following is how they are using Teradata and at what scale. For Wal-Mart including Sam’s Club, Teradata’s first-ever terabyte-scale database is deployed in1992. And it has been developed a lot during these years. “The analytics efforts have essentially helped Wal-Mart become a massive consignment shop.” said by Derrick Harris. It will tell the suppliers how to optimize the shelf space using the data that given by the supplier. Then through the analysis approach, it helps to determine what to sell, the refill frequency, even whether they need to redesign their packaging to fit more on the shelves. It is very helpful and makes more profit for the Wal-Mart stores. Not only Wal-Mart, Apple and eBay also use this approach to increase the customer experience in order to make more profit.
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