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« Tapscott: Web 2.0 is Reshaping Business Intelligence | Main | 'Agility': Can It -- Should It -- Be Measured? » January 23, 2008New Approaches to BI are Brewing
Consumers are a fickle lot -- tastes may change from day to day. How do you keep them engaged with your brand and drive the market, and keep on top of business operations from across the globe? A real-time data warehouse helps. Katrina Coyle, BI manager with Molson Canada, recently explored the ways her company is leveraging new technology approaches to keep up with fast-changing trends across the beverage market. Her presentation was part of a new ebizQ Webinar I moderated, addressing the fast-changing world of business intelligence, which also featured noted author Don Tapscott and SAP's Lothar Schubert. (Audio replay available here. For highlights of Don Tapscott's remarks, check out my previous post here.) "We’ve been brewing beer for a very long time," Katrina noted, stating that "when you’ve been doing something as long as we have, you get a lot of habits that are pretty well ingrained. Trying to shaking the business out of those habits is a challenge." Molson's strategy to transform its organization includes reaching out to a new generation of younger adults through Web 2.0-based marketing strategies, and leveraging service-oriented architecture and data warehouse approaches to build its brands across the globe. An important emphasis is real-time analytics, Katrina said. "We are constantly having to shift and change and shift and adjust very quickly to changes in the marketplace, " she explained. "We all have to be extremely agile. You can’t spend a week trying to figure out whether the promotion is successful. You have to be able to react within hours." It used to be that companies didn't know if a promotion was successful until then end of a quarter, if then. Real-time analytics can look at patterns and trends and provide insights if something is working or not, enabling a quick change in direction. For example, one trend that Molson was able to jump on fairly rapidly was a sudden craze for cold beer in UK pubs -- long bastions of warm beer. Katrina explained that each of its global sites have their own go-to-market models, but all this information needs to be rapidly assimilated. "We have a data warehouse, with lots of information coming in different ways," she said. "It's not necessarily all coming from a centralized ERP system. We also have data coming in from AC Nielsen, for example. "We’ve got to bring that data in, and make sure that it has a harmonized look, so our business can actually make tactical decisions on it." By adopting in-memory technology available through SAP's BI Accelerator, Katrina reports that Molson has been able to move data quickly through its data warehouse. "We’re able to process data now in real time in our warehouse -- we’re not tied to a load once a day or once a week." (Audio replay available here.) Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: Hi, I am very interested in this trend towards a Web2.0 model. I am building a business that will publish Census data as map overlays (DemographicDrapes) for many different themes and accessible as a web service. The idea is that BI solutions providers could subscribe to this service and access these 'drapes' to integrate into something like a GoogleMaps viewer over which they could overlay their own customer data by geocoding addresses (a Google web service) into locations. Currenmtly this service is only targeted for Australia but this model could be replicated wherever census data is available. Do you think this is inline with this trend? I'd be happy to send you a dmonstrator viewer to help you visualise what i am on about. Just let me know. Posted by: Brad Spencer at January 28, 2008 04:17 PM Post a comment |
