BI at Canadian Tire

BI and Canadian Tire

BI is the consolidation and analysis of internal and/or external data for the purpose of effective decision making. BI would help Canadian Tire with the integration of the set of applications and governance procedures that enables sophisticated analytics and smooth flow of information among its functions and sub functions.

Four imperatives were designed to address the BI strategy at Canadian Tire:

1. Implementing the CIO governance council, they assumed the responsibility to develop an enterprise standard to monitor IT spending, annual IT planning, monitoring the IT strategy.
2. The Organizational program would specify the core capabilities and roles of the IT services. It would help Canadian Tire to lay down an IT strategy for Business consulting, integrated solutions. 
3. Process improvements included the co-ordination of the annual IT strategy planning to be based on the corporate strategic planning. 
4. Technological direction was laid down for the re-structuring the organization. 

Organizational structure influencing the BI initiative.

1. The change of CTR image from wholesaler to retailer, which would result in more data processing.
2. FRAG was analyzing and making reports for the marketing department, hence they demanded more data.
3. IT would be more technical focus and enable other groups to take more informed decisions by providing better and standardized data.
4. BI would make the groups more structured and better organized.

Challenges for the implementation of the BI initiative:

1. “Data quality” would be a base to other challenges of CTC.
2. Better data processing could be ensured by providing better services to end- business users. Due to diversity of organization every user had different needs; BI would address to this issue and offer need based solutions. 
3. All the processes needed standardization. BI would ensure data integration by standardizing the processes.
4. Process standardization would reduce cost thus increasing profitability in turn affecting budget and justifying return on investment (ROI).
5. Shadow IT groups provide an alternative source of IT resources to the use groups. These outside groups were involved with technology acquisition, application development, technical support etc. for different departments like finance and supply chain but work outside the governance of the IT function. The biggest challenge was to streamline functions and communicate between both departments. Shadow IT groups interacted with end users thus; they knew the requirement and expectations. Thus, communication between both departments was a test.

The current BI infrastructure system used information warehouse (IW) to organize and extract data to the users. These requests were processed in batches by programs and processes.  The future BI would use Enterprise Data Warehouse which will ensure a real time data processing system. This Enterprise Data warehouse would interact with Supply chain, vendor data, marketing data & HR Data Servers. These data would be compiled to the dashboard and provide real time data to the super users. The challenge to such an infrastructure would be communication, quality and timeliness of queries and data between different servers.