A Market Inquiry and Customer Relationship Oriented (MICRO) Business Intelligence (BI) platform for small and medium enterprise (SME) in the trading industry

Abstract

To meet the unique and unreachable marketing need of SMEs in the trading industry, a customizable Business Intelligence (BI) system called Market Inquiry and Customer Relationship Oriented (MICRO) BI platform has been developed. "MICRO" is an integrated, focused and small-sized BI platform, established and customized on the basis of the architecture and business of a SME engaged in trading. To learn about new markets, the Web Semantic-based Analysis System (WSAS) contained in the MICRO BI facilitates the real-time acquisition and comparison of external and internal marketing information by adopting the techniques of a Web Robot and a Semantic Network. The company makes market inquiries by obtaining information about market segments and fulfillment of orders. This helps to fill the market gaps and assist decision making when deciding on future marketing strategies. Moreover, another system called a Correlation Coefficient Sales Data Mining System (CCSDMS) has also been developed for visualizing customer relationships by uncovering periodic sales patterns and relationships of products in sales databases. This is accomplished by applying the technique of quantitative correlation coefficient mining. Product relations are the basis of product enhancement or development. CCSDMS also reveals customer consumption patterns which is the kind of marketing information that needs to be retained. In addition, periodic sales patterns are another kind of marketing information that is useful because it describes customers' periodic demands. In order to realize the capability of the MICRO BI platform, a prototype platform has been built and trial implemented in a selected reference site named "Angus Electronics Company Limited" through a teaching company scheme. A series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed systems. The results are compared with a well known market available data mining system named Weka. It is interesting to note that that the system possesses a higher predictive power than Weka. Moreover, a number of potential benefits are realized. Angus's customer service is improved by providing reliable and value-added buying solutions tailored to the needs of each customer in a short period of time. Sensitivity in detecting changes in markets is enhanced so that managers can immediately decide on marketing strategies to cope with changes in market demand. Angus can also suggest possible ways for product enhancement and integration to vendors in order to cope with market demands. On a whole, the performance of the proposed MICRO BI platform is found to be better than that of commercial available BI system. Since the platform is developed in a standard ordinary scenario of a trading company, the theory and practice developed in the present study can be used with other trading companies or component supporters with appropriate customization and refinement of the components in the platform. The successful development of the MICRO BI platform provides an integrated and focused solution for the trading industry to help them to sustain their ability to compete in the fiercely competitive business environment and helps to transform them into solution providers.