Textile Company A: Business Intelligence System

Textile Company A: Business Intelligence System

Introduction

Textile Company A is a small business in North Carolina that is currently struggling due to the changing global environment. The organization is engaged in the purchase of textiles in Europe, the Middle and Far East, as well as their distribution in the United States. The complication of global supply chains leads to a constant increase in the cost of purchasing textiles, which negatively affects the company’s profits. To overcome this crisis, Textile Company A plans to expand its operations to South America and Canada. In this regard, the company needs to upgrade its information infrastructure for better data analytics within the company.

Prior to the implementation of the project to create a business intelligence (BI) system, the organization used an outdated approach to storing and analyzing data. It was minimally automated and did not allow working effectively with a large amount of data. In particular, the company used several separate data sources (CRM, ERP, individual databases, and external sources) and generated individual reports based on the data received from each of them. This approach made holistic data analytics and information-driven decision-making more difficult. A diagram illustrating the old data analytics system at Textile Company A is presented in Figure 1.