ISM 425 Enterprise Guide Assignment 2 For this assignment, you need to use the Grocery Store Dimensional Modeling Data Mart to recommend at least 10 specific actions that the management can take to increase profitability. For each recommendation, describe the specifics of your recommendation and justify why if the management were to follow your recommendation, the profitability would increase. Basically, for each recommendation, you need to justify why you are making this recommendation. “Don’t just take my word for it, see the results of the analytics for yourself.” Some recommendations could be one dimensional whereas others are multidimensional. A single dimensional recommendation is one that touches only one dimension and/or fact table only. For example if you recommend to change a store’s layout to increase profitability that is a one dimensional analysis. Sometimes these kind of analyses are referred to dimensional browsing. Multi- dimensional recommendations, on the other hand, use two or more dimensions along with the fact table. For example, changing prices of product in a given store, that is based on store dimension and product dimension. The most interesting recommendations are multi-dimensional. In making your recommendation, please specify exactly what your recommendation is, how you came up with it, that is what Enterprise Guide feature(s) you used and what your assumption(s), if any, were. For example, if you recommend remodeling old stores, how did you find out that old stores are less profitable, how much would it cost to remodel a typical store and how much additional sales would it generate. Be creative and reasonable about your assumptions. And have fun with it. In developing your report, please develop a memo addressed to me. In the memo include a one page executive summary where summarize your recommendations broadly and under categories. For example, store recommendations, or store and product recommendations where you would recommend changes in products by store, etc. In your report make references to specifics of each recommendation in the body of your memo. The output beyond what you need to justify your recommendation can go in the appendix. Your memo/write up should be around 10-15 pages. To get you started, I have included some sample ways for you to use to base your recommendations on. You can use these or develop your own. 1. Create a “total profit” column in sales fact table that is equal to (total sales – total cost) and total profit per customer column (that is total profit/customer count). Then create summary tables or graphs that show total profit, profit per customer, total unit sales, total sales, total cost and the contribution to total profit for each store or day of the week, brand or promotion, etc. Then use these tables to find the unprofitable stores, day of the weeks, or brands etc and find out why they are unprofitable. You find that out by going to the respective dimension table. For example, for an unprofitable store, look at store table and see what can they do, would you recommend that they need to remodel or increase the size of the store, or does the location matter? For an unprofitable brand, can you recommend that you renegotiate some new pricing scheme with the vendor, or increase the selling price, etc. 2. Find out which is the least profitable product or brand or store in each city or region and then find out why? Do people in LA eat less lasagna than people in Boston? What about customer count? Can you recommend a promotion in LA for example, buy one lasagna and get a dollar off on your next purchase? 3. Find out what are the most profitable products or brands and try to sell more of them by increasing level of promotion for them. 4. Are some promotion campaigns that costing us more than the profit they generate? If so, why continue them? 5. Are the stores that offer financial services more profitable? If so, make all the store having them, if not could you stop offering financial services? 6. Others….
