CHAPTER 11 : OPENING CASE

1. Why is it important for any company to use CRM  strategics to manage customer information ??

• Will provide better customer service
• It will increase customers cost revenue.
• Customer can make call centers more efficient
• It will help sales staff close deals faster with customers
• Company will identify cross sell products more effectively

2. If the virtual world is the first point of contract between a company and its customers how might that transform the entire shopping experience??

POSITIVE SIDES

• IT more easy to make conversation and transaction
• The communication will be more effective because customer can face to face with seller
• The customer can give comments or critic in front of the virtual tools

NEGATIVE SIDES

• Higher cost in maintenance
• Customer did not know about the actual product
• It will hard for customer to communicate if the machine in technical problem

CHAPTER 10: EXTENDING THE ORGANIZATION - SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

10.1 : List and describe the components of a typical supply chain.

Plan - This is the strategic portion of supply chain management. A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services. A big pieces of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, cost less and delivery high quality and value to customer.

Sources - Companies must carefully choose reliable supplier that will deliver goods and services required for making products. Companies must also develop a set of pricing, delivery and payment process with supplies and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships.

Make - This is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging and preparing for delivery. This is by far the most metric- intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.

Deliver - This step is commonly referred to as logistics. Logistics is the set of processes that plans for controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers. During this step, companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfill the orders via a network of warehouse, pick transportation companies to deliver the products and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.

Return - This is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and supports customers who have problems with delivered products.

10.2 : Define the relationship between decision making and supply chain management.

Involved the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain maximize total supply chain effectiveness and profitability.

10.3 : Describe the four changes resulting from advances in IT  that are driving supply chains.

Visibility

More visible models of different ways to do things in the supply chain have emerged. High visibility in the supply chain is changing industries, as Wal Mart demonstrated.

Consumer Behavior

• Companies can respond faster and more effectively to consumer demands through supply chain enhances
•  Once an organization understands customer demand and its effect on the supply chain it can begin to estimate the impact that its supply chain will have on its customers and ultimately the organizations performance

Competition

• Supply chain planning (SCP) software - Uses advanced mathematical algorithms to improve the flow and efficiency of the supply chain.
• Supply chain execution (SCE) software - Automates the different steps and stages of the supply chain

Speed

These system raise the accuracy between internal users. Another aspects of speed is the company ability to satisfy continually changing customer requirements efficiency accurately and quickly.

10.4 : Summarize the best practices for implementing a successful supply chain management system.

Make The Sale To Supplies

Not only will the people in the organization need to changes the way they work, but also the people from each supplier that is added to the network must change.

Wean Employees Off Traditional Business Practices

Operation people typical deal with phone call, faxes and order scrawled on paper and will most likely want to keep in that way.

Ensure The SCM System Supports The Organizational Goals

It is important to select scm software that gives organizations and advantages in the areas most crucial to their business success.

Deploy In Incremental Phases and Measure and Communicate Success.

For it instance instead of installing a complete supply chain management system across the company and all supplier at once start by getting it working with a few key supplier.

Be Future Oriented

The supply chain design must anticipate the future state of the business because scm system likely will last for many more years than originally planned manager need to explore hoe flexible the system will be when changes are requires in the future

CHAPTER 9: DECISION MAKING

Four most common categories of Artificial Intelligence (AI):

1. Genetic Algorithms - An artificial intelligent system that mimics the evolutionary, survival of the fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem. It essentially an optimizing system, it finds the combination of inputs that give the best outputs. Useful when each space very large or too complex for analytic treatment. In each iteration (generation) possible solutions or individuals represented as strings of numbers.

2. Intelligent Agents - Is an autonomous entity which observes through sensors and acts upon an environment using actuators and directs its activity towards achieving goals. Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals. They may be very simple or very complex, a reflex machine such as a thermostat is an intelligent agent, as is a human being, as is a community of human beings working together towards a goal.

3. Expert System - In the financial field is expert system for mortgages. Loan department are interested in expert systems for mortgages because of the growing cost of labor, which makes the handling and acceptance of relatively small loans less profitable. They also see a possibility for standardized, efficient handling of mortgages loan by applying expert systems, appreciating that for the acceptance of mortgages there are hard and fast rules which do not always exist with other types of loans.

4. Neutral Networks - Consider a real estate appraiser whose job is to predict the sale price of residential houses. As with the Bank Loans example, the input pattern consists of a group of numbers. For example, number of bedrooms, number of stories, floor area, age of construction, neighborhood prices, size of lot and distance to schools. This problem is similar to the Bank Loans example, because it has many non linearity and is subject to millions of possible inputs patterns. The different here is that the output prediction will consist of a calculated value the selling price of the house. It is possible to train the neural network to simulate the opinion of an expert appraiser or to predict the actual selling price.

CHAPTER 8: ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION (DATA WAREHOUSE)

1. ROLES AND PURPOSES OF DATA WAREHOUSES AND DATA MART IN ORGANIZATION

The purpose of the Data Warehouse in the overall Data Warehousing Architecture is to integrate corporate data. It contains the "single version of truth" for the organization that has been carefully constructed from data stored in disparate internal and external operational databases. The amount of data in the Data Warehouse is massive. Data is stored at a very granular level of detail. For example, every sale that has ever occurred in the organization is recorded and related to dimensions of interest. This allows data to be sliced and diced, summer and grouped in unimaginable ways.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Data Warehouses does not contain all the data in the organization. It's purpose is to provide key business metrics that are needed by the organization for strategic and tactical decision making. Decision makers don't access the Data Warehouse directly. This is done through various front-end Data Warehouse Tools that read data from subject specific Data Marts. The Data Warehouse can be either relational or dimensional. This depends on how the business intends to use the information.

2. THE RELATIONSHIP OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND DATA WAREHOUSING

Changing data info information and knowledge. Many of tool vendors who sell their products or software call it business intelligence software rather than Data Warehousing. So what is it?????

Business Intelligence is a term commonly associated with Data Warehousing. Business Intelligence is a generalized term where a company initiates various activities to gather today's market information which also includes about their competitor. Today's business Intelligence systems are contrasted to more classical way of information gathering in mining and crunching the data in the most optimal manner. In short we can say BI simplifies information discovery and analysis. In this way the company will have a competitive advantage of business and intelligently using the available data in strategic and effective decision making. It has the ability to bring disparate data under one roof with a meaningful information and ready for analysis.

Business Intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to make decisions on. A Data Warehousing (or data mart) system is the backed or the infrastructural, component for achieving business intelligence. Business intelligence also includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as well as unstructured data. Example, data warehousing. All the source data from disparate sources are used to load/stage data. Different sources can be flat files, another database or some other process. The starting point of the data warehouse should extract the data in order to load into its environment. This is extracting. This data may not be the expected format or size. Your business demands are different on your organization business requirements are different. So the business process has to modify the data or better word is to transform the incoming data to meet requirements and objectives. This is call Transformation.

Once every slicing and dicing of the data is done along with applied business rules, this data is ready for loading into the target tables. This process is called Loading. So overall till now we have done extraction, Transformation and loading. In short we call this ETL. There are lot of tools available in today's market which does help in achieving the ETL process. Once this data is loaded into the database, this is ready for next processing. We call that database as data warehouse database. The next process could be building of data marts or directly reporting from it. There are lot of tools or software available for reporting/analysis. Some call it business reporting or analysis  tool. But if you see the whole process has intelligence involved in business. We can call this or the gurus call it data warehousing and the system involves from end to end is called business intelligence system.

CHAPTER 7: STORING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION DATABASE

1. define the fundamental concept of the relational database model ?

A relational database is a collection of data items organized as a set of formally described tables from which data can be accessed easily. A relational database is created using the relational model. The software used in a relational database is called a relational database management system (RDBMS). A relational database is the predominant choice in storing data, over other models like the hierarchical database model or the network model.

2. evaluate the advantages of the relational database model?

Database advantages from a business perspective include increase flexibility, increase scalability and performance, reduce information redundancy, increase information integrity (quality) and increase information security.

increase flexibility

Can manipulated the information or present in many way and in the different shape.
-have only one physical view:
    physical view- deals with the physical storage of information on a storage device.
-have multiple logical views:
    logical view- focuses on how users logically access information.

increase scalability and performance

A database must scale to meet increased demand, while maintaining acceptable performance levels. 
-scalability
    refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands.
-performance
    measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction.

reduce information redundancy

Databases reduce information redundancy
-redundancy
    the duplication of information or storing the same information in multiple places.
Inconsistency is one of the primary problems with redundant information.

increase information integrity (quality)

Information Integrity is a measure of the quality of information. Within a database environment integrity constraints are rules that help ensure the quality of information.
-relational integrity constraint
    rule that enforces basic and fundamental information based constraints.
-business critical integrity constraint
    rule that enforce business rules vital to an organization's success and often required more insight and knowledge than relational integrity constraint.    
                                                                                                                        
increase information security

Information is an organizational asset and must be protected. Database offer several security features including password, access level and access control.
-password
    provides authentication of the user.
-access level
    determines who has access to the different types of information.
-access control
    determines types of user access, such as read- only access.

3. define a database management system and its relationship to a website?

Database management systems (DBMS) is a software through which users and application programs interact with a database.

Data driven websites an interactive website kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of its customers through the use of a database.

4. explain why an organization would want to integrate its database?

Data integration refers to the organization's inventory of data and information assets as well as the tools, strategies and philosophies by which fragmented data assets are aligned to support business goals. The company want to integrate its database because they will connect, communicate, dealing and having relation with its customer everyday. Everyday its customers will open the webpage and search anything appear on the page. Therefore, if the product still available or not available the supplier must inform the customer immediately. Publish the information on the web page to make the customer realize that the product exist or not in the market. Then, when the customer got information they will not too disappointed and not waiting too long. Customers satisfy, the business relationship between sellers and customers will be effective and launch smoothly.