Mini Case Study
ShoeSmart
ShoeSmart is an online retail business founded by Achiles Bunion in 2010. The company decided to
investigate a Business Intelligence (BI) solution to analyse around a million transactions from almost
100,000 customers in their database. To better understand what their customers want, they also like
to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Together with their BI system,
they also hope it will give them insight on the needs of their customers so they can come up with
new products/services.
The vision of the company is “to be the go-to online retail store for Australians for their shoe
needs” by offering speed, convenience, choice, and price delivered to customer doors within 30
minutes or less. To speed up their warehouse and delivery operations, they currently use an RFID
asset tracking system in their packing warehouses to speed up locating and allocating resources.
They also use a proprietary GPS system that allow their delivery drivers to find the fastest routes to
their destinations and avoid any delays.
One of their main competitors, FootFriend recently used analytics to build a data-centric approach
to its business. For example, the initial reports produced by their BI system identified that Nike Air,
Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star and Adidas Superstar were their most popular shoes in the last
quarter of 202x. As a result, they’ve realised that Big Data could reveal insights they don’t know
before which could even create new sources of revenue for the business.
“We had a lot of data coming from our point-of-sales software. Initially, the challenge was
how to a develop a quick way to talk to the company’s POS database. After they found an
easy way to access the data, their next challenge was to drill down into the information in
ways that would positively impact business results. Our goal was to use the huge amount of
transaction data in a cost-effective way and find the right metrics to help us drive our
business forward,” said Tibilias Talus, vice president of R&D and analytics at FootFriend.
FootFriend use Tableau to crunch its data. Tableau is a data visualization software focused on
business intelligence. Tableau is a powerful and fastest growing data visualization tool. It helps in
simplifying raw data into the very easily understandable format in the form of dashboards and
worksheets. Tableau is cost-effective as it only cost them $70 per month for the subscription. After
rolling out their Big Data strategy, FootFriend have nearly doubled their annual sales to $878,850
and welcomed an additional 15,000 customers in 202x, a 10% increase in total customer count.
In contrast, ShoeSmart used Microsoft Access but eventually used SQL to talk directly to the
company’s POS database. Luckily, they have an in-house IT personnel specialising in SQL who made
all the necessary queries and reports that they need for organisational decision-making. However,
they are now in need of an analytics software that could make reports in an understandable format
in the form of dashboards and worksheets to help simplify decision-making. Hence, they are
currently investigating the possibility of also using Tableau and have hired an external consultant to
help them in this regard
Discuss the features of enterprise systems and their functions to support business processes
and how its implementation will provide real benefits to organisation (e.g., competitive
advantage, improved customer traffic, improved sales and profit, etc