Lecturer,
Today's consumer is much more sophisticated and demands a compelling shopping experience. For this, the store manager needs to have an in-depth understanding of his/her tastes and purchasing behavior (Chain store age, Sep98), focusing on computerizing business processes for competitive advantage. So we used Data warehousing collection of critical information for execution of successful enterprise. It helps to identify the competitive priorities and help the organization to be clear on their core competencies. It gathers the hidden treasure of the organization. Data mining can help the manager gain complete insight of consumer buying behavior.
Data Warehouse is a DSS, a data warehouse is an architectural construct of an information system that provides users with current and historical decision support information that is hard to access or present in traditional operational systems. On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is an element of DSS. A decision support database that is maintained separately from the organization's operational databases (William Inmon,1996). A data warehouse is (a) Subject-oriented, (b) Integrated, (c) Time-varying and (d) Non-volatile (Duane Sharp, 2009). The characteristic of DW is an analysis driven by (a) Ad-hoc queries, (b) Complex queries, (c) Used by top managers, (d) Based on Dimensional Modeling and (e) Denormalized structures. Date Warehouse is designed around “Subjects” rather than processes. Need to integrate source data to arrive a common code in Data Warehouse (Ralph Kimball,1996).
The aim of the study is to make use of data mining techniques to improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales tactics using customer data already available to the company. Using this information we can segment customers based on buying behavior, explore cross-selling opportunity, Inventory policy planning can be improved and World Wide Web merchant could use it to determine the layout of their catalog and order form (Progressive grocer, 2003).
