Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Thiruda Thiruda !!





Most of us who are in the Business Intelligence (B.I) field proclaim that B.I takes us the closest to Real time data and supplies us with spot-on Information about things.What I experienced today was something amazing and made me realise that the above said fact is not just lip service.

Many of you know that for the past month or so Iam camping at the Corp HQ of a Retail Chain. They are designing their 1st Data Warehouse and your's trulyhas been assisting them in doing so.Early this morning, we got a call from the Corporate Affairs about a case that happened lastevening at one of their store in Alabama. Someone came to return their product and claim refund. The clerk accepted the return and was about to ask what mode of refund the person would prefer, when she found a gun was being trained on her.The shop lifter looted what ever was available and skooted away.

A pretty normal case we see on T.V rite ?

This is where B.I came to the rescue !The stupid shop lifter (Mr X - henceforth) had left his receipt at the counter and the Corporate Affairs wanted us to probewhat little information we can find about him from that. Like any big chain in the US, my client has a detailed CRM program that captures information about it's clients, giving the information or not is your decision but Mr X decided to do so exactly 62 days back when he bought the product.

Within 10 minutes of the request, we were able to generate the shop lifter's Phone Number, Address, First Name, Last Nameand even his Fav color and Hang out spot ! The police feels they have never recieved such a detailed information about a thief, well all they had to do was go introduce themselves and arrest that goofy goon, I suppose !

I was ruing the fact why am I literally in the middle of nowhere, when most my friends are in SOHO,NY or So Co, Austin !

But this experience made the stint worth it !

5 comments:

Q said...

This idiot of a thirudan is an insult to all thirudans in this world. Anyhow, you had mentioned that the retail chain is designing its first datawarehouse. For someone relatively new to BI it rings a bell. How does their BI function efficiently without the support of a datawarehouse?

RaviShankar said...

My fault - Their first data warehouse with Microstrategy !

Anonymous said...

Sorry for very late comment man. but i am not sure what so amazing about this. i worked on microsoft reporting tool. if the data has be captured and stored in an organised database, even with few queries i cud get the information. datawarehouse queries are little tricky but wat so spl abut this??. may be i am asking an ignorant question or i know how database or reporting tools works.

RaviShankar said...

We are talking about Text Analytics in Unstructured data.

OLAP services of MSFT and several other OLAP tools are amazing when dealing with strucured data.

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