Big data. You continue to hear a lot about it these days. When people ask me about the overall goal of both big data and analytics, they say, “Is it about customer intimacy? Is it about getting closer to customers and anticipating what they are doing? Is it more streamlining your ability to locate places where you might want to distribute? Or is it about streamlining your supply chain?”
The answer to all of the above is Yes. What you prioritize depends on the company and the industry you’re in. What’s clear to me is that you are likely to fail if you try to do everything at the same time. But if you take it all in bits and pieces and deliver value at each stage, then the enthusiasm builds with every win. Because when your colleagues see the value that you’re delivering in one new area of big data functionality and the data analytics that you can do with it, they’re just going to do more and they’ll want it – fast.
Interstate Battery is a wholesale distribution company with over 200,000 dealers to whom we sell our batteries and our automotive technology. Today we’re looking at data that is being sold to our distributors, and also data that the distributors are selling to our dealers. The problem is that we’re not tied into dealer retail systems, and most of them don’t want us to tie into their retail system.
So how can we get data to feed our strategy? That’s the focus of our experimentation right now. If we can get data, then we’ll be at a new level of having real-time information on what’s happening and what are the products we need to have on that rack in that store. If your car battery fails, I guarantee you’re not going to say, “Hey honey, I want to go out this weekend and shop for a battery.” You’re going to go to the closest place you have to get that car up and running again. That’s why we’re in 200,000 locations. We want to be able to have that battery when you need it. That goal drives our business intelligence and analytics.
Agile and Big Data: A Marriage Made in IT
Interstate’s original analytics system was custom. We developed all the functionality and drop-down menus that would analyze all our sales information. The problem was that we would perhaps have two releases a year that would deliver new functionality. We needed something that we could get out on a regular basis.
To change that, we did two things in the development cycle of our new system. First we moved to an agile methodology. That means we’re putting things out in three-week sprints. Second, we started using a geospatial analytics package called Esri. Right now analytics is actually built using MicroStrategy, but we’ve created the integration between Esri and MicroStrategy. That’s constantly being enhanced. We strive that every three weeks something gets released and that has really made a huge difference.
What are we looking to see now? Faster, more updated views of sales information. The ability to identify a market we may be under-serving, or another market where we may be seeing a dip. Which areas and markets are profitable, and which ones are not? Where do we have competition that’s trying to eat our lunch?
The Big Data Dream Team: IT + Business
And who is on this big data and analytics team? We have a group where at least 50 percent of the people are in the business, that own our analytical project, and the other half are IT. They are constantly keeping their eyes and ears open on something that could really deliver value to us. They have new technology vendors come in and give demonstrations. They might see new technologies at a conference.
And although we are not purely in the cloud today, we do rely on SaaS applications like Salesforce, which is a major part of what we do and what we use. A lot of that data comes into our warehouse and our ERP system in a tightly integrated way. But we made the decision about tight integration with SaaS applications even before we even started using Salesforce. What’s nice about a SaaS application in the cloud is that there are no data centers or anything else. We get the data that we want to use within the analytical realm. And thanks to our conversion to Agile, we are constantly able to add or change new functionality to manage the flood of data that’s constantly coming our way – and coming to just about every business near you.
For more on big data, read Tom Soderstrom's article, "Five Ways CIOs can save time and dig deeper on big data projects."
Merv Tarde is Vice President of Interstate's Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. He sets the strategic direction for IT and oversees all IT based networks, systems and resources serving customers throughout the Interstate Batteries System. He is also responsible for Interstate's office facilities and real estate. Prior to joining Interstate in 1998, he spent over 20 years in Telecom starting with Bell Laboratories and ending up with AT&T Wireless where he held several executive-level positions.
