Mini Case Study : WillMart

WillMart is an online retail business founded by Willy Martin in 2011. The company decided to investigate a business analytics solution to analyse around a million transactions from almost 100,000 customers in their database. They are hoping that through their BI system they could better understand what their customers want. The vision of the company is "to be the go-to online retail store for Australians for their everyday needs" by offering speed, convenience, choice, and price delivered to customers door 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. To better understand their customers, they would like to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that will give them insight on the needs of their customers, hence, could help them come up with new products/services.

One of their main competitors, QMart recently used analytics to build a data-centric approach to its business. For example, the initial reports produced by their BI system identified that pie maker, blender and air fryers were the most popular products their customers buy in 202x. As a result, they've realised that their 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 B. W. Targey, vice president of R&D and analytics at QMart.

QMart used 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, QMart 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, WillMart 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 using Tableau and have hired an external consultant to help them in this regard.

WillMart said that the three foremost analytics questions they asked:

• How can we further improve our services?
• How do we reduce delivery times?
• How can we find hidden needs and fill up with new products and services?

The problems they are facing include information silos, decentralised data, lack of data analytics and visualisation strategies, lack of business intelligence skilled personnel and lack of customer relationship management system solution.

Initial investigation revealed that possible CRM solutions includes cloud-based CRM such as Zoho CRM, Salesforce, SugarCRM or Monday.com. However, they are still at a lost whether to go proprietary or open-source, and assuming they will use Tableau as their BI system, will it interface well with their CRM solution of choice? They would like you to help them in this regard.

Once you formulated your recommendation solution, you now need to provide a critique of the proposed solution. Your critique should include a discussion of the features of the proposed enterprise CRM solution, its functions in support of business processes, such as its ability to produce customer insight reports, including a justification of its "fitness" to the organisational needs, such as alignment to the company's strategic goals (such as, will this CRM solution help better understand customer needs?). It may also include cost/benefit calculations, such as ROI, payback analysis, and Net Present Value (NPV). Also, will the proposed CRM solution interface well with Tableau?

Describe the role of information systems in supporting operations and organisational decision making.

Discuss the features of enterprise systems and their functions to support business processes.

Critique the alignment of an organisation's information systems strategy and business strategy.

The following areas should be covered in your assignment using the case study context:

1. Provide a brief description of the organisation

2. Provide a description of the current information systems problems (e.g., information silos, lack

of BI capabilities, etc) and describe the role of information systems in supporting operations

and organisational decision making (e.g., creation of dashboards and worksheets)

3. 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)

4. Critique the information system solutions proposed. Are they aligned to the company's business strategic vision?