Intelligent operational dashboards for smarter commerce using big data

In the retail industry, business intelligence (BI) solutions have traditionally required a static data model for operational reporting. These solutions often do not use streaming data that can provide operational intelligence (OI). However, the emergence of multi-channel selling and fulfillment has increased the need for dynamic data analytics to process streaming data. SCM (supply chain management) businesses can gain new operational insights by taking advantage of the unique capabilities of big data systems and by using the right approach to process large volumes of unstructured streaming data. This paper reviews the current research on OI that uses streaming data and proposes an approach to design intelligent operational dashboards for the SCM systems. Data is streamed from a relational database management system (RDBMS) to a big data database, which helps to apply the principles of correlation and to derive an intelligent data model. Real-time operational dashboards, derived from such data models, can be used for strategic BI reporting (using historical data), operational BI reporting (using streaming data), and alerting. We have used the IBM Sterling Order Management System to demonstrate the proposed approach.