MBA 633 Assignment 2

Digital Analytics, Big Data and Technology

Case Study Analysis

Content Page

Executive Summary 2

Case Study 2

Business Issues 3

An Overview of the case study 4

Recommendation 4

Steps to be taken 5

Reporting Mechanism 8

Conclusion 8

Referent list 9

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 Executive summary

Big data can leverage company practices to make right decisions based on reliable and verifiable data. It
could help to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, cut operational cost, save time on manual
process and maximize competitive advantage over competitors. For example CIO insight found that 79%
of Executives said Big Data could help them to make better business decisions.

While most people believe that big data is effective tool to achieve company’s goals and objectives. But
many argue that big data comprise with overload, dirty, unclean and inconsistent data. Which consider
as bad, poor data that can lead to make false decisions too?

Decision that made from poor data can create to serious business problems. It will affect the
implementing process which requires clean, consistent data. The process automation can’t process
inconsistent data. It will cause business to make wrong decisions due to underlying incorrect data (Lowe
S, 2012).

Companies lose revenue and competitive advantage from poor, out of date or incorrect data. Some
study (Information Age, 2014) showed that 79% of executives and managers have made decision
without complete the right set of data. 14% of them made decision daily. A survey from PWC in 2014
estimated that companies will lose approximately $1-10 million from the decisions were made from
poor data. Gartner survey also supported that 40% of business decision will fail due to poor data quality.

Case study

Advanced Natural Spa (AN) was established in 2005 as beauty spa shop in Bangkok Thailand. It was
success in spa business and has 3 shops under this name. It was built during analog era with a little bit of
digital initiation such as website to give basic information about location, operation time and services.

After 10 years operation. It reached mature stage in business life cycle. It lost market share to online
companies. The sale decreased and it needed to find solution to make business life cycle goes up again.
In 2016 it hired new management team to help and increase sale, awareness and launched new retailing
skin care product.

New management wants to sell skin care product to increase margin and revenue. They positioned skin
care products to go to mass market and stepped in both offline and online channels. It wanted to shift
the business from spa business into retailing industry. They had started many projects and activities
such as sent questionnaire to ask about what customers are looking for in skin care? What aroma and
preferred scent in body and shampoo products? etc.

They use existing CRM to investigate what should be manufactured into new skin care product line and
finding new lead list into purchase the new products. The new team realized how important of internet
and online platforms in a business world nowadays. They applied Google Analytics.

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The new team collect, analyzes, extract and implement data and target to enhance Customer Relation
Management, increase revenue and decrease operation cost.

Business Issues

New management used data from existing customer’s database, loyalty program. They collected new
lead data base from direct and indirect marketing activities in both online and offline for example play
game on social medium, like and share on Facebook, Instragram and Twitter to get free product sample.

They also bought new lead list from outsource data warehouse. This list relevant to their targeted age,
sex, demographic, location base, income and behavior. They used data to introduce products,
encourage sales, and enhance customer satisfactions. Such as questionnaire about new products and
services, create awareness of products and brand, launch new product, give away trial and follow up.

They wanted to know how much to invest in marketing campaign and how effective of those
campaigns? Which activities/ channels create more conversion? How quickly can turn leads into sales?

And more importantly did they have sufficient data to make the right business decisions? They found
out that they were challenged with poor data quality issue. These issues were out of date database,
incorrect data and duplication. This poor and inconsistency data affected their decision making.

Another issue occurred when purchased lead list from data warehouse, later found out that nearly 30%
of the list was inaccurate. Which mean the list has wrong email, telephone number and etc. When this
company run marketing campaign on social media, telephone sell, sent physical mail or email to the
names on the list. The production cost was 30% higher than it should be in every channels. Plus wasting
time on phone call and other activities relate to this sale. Email showed low open rate and other metric
affected from this poor data.

Using existing data and buying from many sources can lead to another issue which is over load data. This
issue also led to make a wrong decision making due to over load and consider as poor data too.
Overload data consume more time to make a decision. As it takes more time to clean, extract, utilize
and implement data. It will cost both investment and manpower to do if there is no good DQM.

Moreover, this company applied Predictive Analytics with existing data and past experience to forecast
future actions from customer, products and suppliers. To analyze customer responses, sale revenue and
how to increase sell opportunities.

(Google Analytics has many layers of data to filter through like location, channel, devices and etc. And is
considered as an example of bad data)

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 An overview of the case study

The case study shows how importance of data quality in decision making. The company can make right
decision with reliable and verifiable data. Without adequate data quality, data will become useless and
can create the serious problems to organizations.

Data quality defied as a current or existent data that company can start with. It has valid value
acceptable and consistency. Integrity with accurate relationship between data elements and data sets.
Accurate to the object model and relevance to support the objective.

Gartner Survey showed data grows 40% annually and almost 20% are poor or dirty data. Poor data
quality cost the companies around $2-4 million a year.

(Source RingLead)

Recommendation

Advanced Natural wants to accomplish data quality. It needs to follow instruction below to manage
tools and Data Quality Management to achieve the best outcomes.

(Data Quality Management requires vigilant actions and careful monitor at all steps: (1) collection data,
(2) storage and updating data, (3) retrieving data, and (4) processing and preparing data for analysis)

Clean Data can save up operational cost as RingLead chart shows below:

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 (Source RingLead)

Besides from cost saving, it provides consistency, more reliable and verifiable data and can be a
foundation for any decision making. Understanding customer’s behavior, satisfaction, respond at real
time. On top of that it generates effectively productivity.

Steps to be taken

1. Minimize the occurrence of poor data from collecting data phase. In this case is to modify the User
Interface (UI) and permit only to fill valid data. This will minimize the chance of poor data creation. For
example

Sex: Male Female Other to choose only Male Female

2. This company can apply one-time data quality clean up to update data and transfer to another
system, or set up to ongoing cleansing process for a great deal or error prone data set. Be careful if clean
too often may cause data error.

3. Invest in Business Intelligence infrastructure.

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Invest in new organization data management infrastructure to store and analyze data. To monitor
business problems, equipped employee with variety of data analytics tools and experts. Analyze
customer’s behavior and future action plans.

Poor data quality will lead to false decision and the consequences will affect significantly to organization
in competitive advantage, operation cost and CRM. It’s recommended to apply BI technology driven
process to support organization’s decision making.

Business Intelligence (BI) can be applied as tool to analyses and extract value from many big volume
data sources. The development of BI will helps to identify the errors and low quality data. It recognizes
the different from data sources and data types.

4. Create Data Quality Management (DQM)

Hence this organization realizes how important of data quality analysis that link to company decision
making. Therefore they should implement Data Quality Management (DQM) for better data analysis.

DQM is a best practice for companies relate to efficiency data analysis and return of investment. DQM
comprise of obtaining data, applying advanced data processes, allocating the effective data and dealing
with oversight data. It has many levels of strict data quality to evaluate the compliant standard
regulations and demands. Organization can apply various data quality processes to maximize the ability
to increase BI and optimize competitive advantage that can exaggerate the return of BI investment.
DQM can assist to increase ROI.

This RingLead chart below pointed out the saving from having quality data.

(Source RingLead)

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5. Recommend this company to apply Prescriptive Analytics. This analytics will helps to examine content,
data then determine the steps to take to make a right decision to achieve the company goals and
objectives. This analytics uses graph, model, complex event processing and machine learning.

Prescriptive Analytics will help forecast the effect of future decision making from the different
prediction setting tests. Then the company can modify the decision from different outcomes before they
have been made. This analytics will assist organization to develop better decision making process.

The company can integrate data from ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM( Customer Relationship
Management), SCM( Supply Chain Management) to improve business intelligence, learn and compare
the outcomes when they could managed differently.

Study show the complement of company apply both predictive Analytics and Prescriptive Analytics. It
will help to understand customer behavior and apply this behavioral data to be a guideline for product
and service decision making. It can increase sale margin and report any unexpected events will be
notified.

6. Set permanent goal to be Data Driven Organization

After built BI infrastructure and create DQM within organization. It would maximize the ability to
measure in more detail than before. To become data driven organization need to change the culture in
organization. Change the attitude toward data application, because technology alone couldn’t help
organization to achieve this goal and objective.

Most of managers used data like pie charts, bar charts and number to support and confirm the decision
which already had been made. It is not the real principle of data driven organization which integrate and
experiment from right data. The company should change how to use data, learn new things and set up
test from data to find the right answers.

Transform CRM to fully data application to measure customer satisfaction with various intermediate
metrics.

Recruit experts; consider what organization look for, scope, ability of expert and capacity and long term
vision of the organization. The expert should have skill sets relevant to analytics skills, programming ,
statistics, machine learning and understanding the business. Even though it is difficult to find unicorn in
one person but organization could recruit people who has these qualifications.

In the beginning ask the question and build on reasonable and reliable infrastructure for data collecting,
storage. Then start to integrate complex analytics. Do not waste money by starting from complex
analytics.

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 Recommends appropriate reporting mechanisms

If this company could apply and integrate as recommendation above. The report mechanism will evolve
from static, passive style from using data to support the decision that had already been made to be real
time data analysis with data visualization based on underlying data. And use data to experiment, learn
and compare different outcome from viable probability. And make the right decision from the testing.

Many analytics tools provide various of visualization like info graphic, graph, pie chart an so on, that can
help to better understanding.

In this case need to consider who is the main audience too. The report style for stake holders and public
will be different in wording and detail.

Organization report will become simples and the reports can be trusted because the underlying data is
trusted.

Conclusion

With advanced technology and business innovation. Big data can be a powerful tool for organization to
make better decision. But organization needs to realize its technology capacity from retrieving huge
volume and high speed data from many sources. Many organizations DQM is not sophisticated enough
to manage quality data. Poor data can result in poor diagnose, predict and forecast and lead to bad
decisions. Case study and recommendation provided in this report point out how important of data
quality management and how to implement this method within organization. Build organization data
driven to minimize failing business decision making and improve standard and practice for better
performance.

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