Technology 

Databases and Data Warehouses

           In Data Processing, a file is a related collection of records and Best Buy uses a stretch of different types of those files. Some of them include costumer file, employee file, order file and some broader files like transaction, report or work files. All of those files provide valuable information for management and benefit the company. Best Buy by utilizing the data contained in such files, helps the company translate costumer insights into merchandising action. Operational databases make up the basic business intelligence of the company to create and ensure competitive advantage.  Best Buy uses OLAP model that is the manipulation of information to support decision making.

          

          Different databases like product and costumer are stored into one data warehouse and form business intelligence. Bet Buy manages their database with Oracle’s software relying on their real application clusters and oracle automatic storage management. Database administrator is responsible for the databases as well as for the data mining and received feedback info from different departments. William Levitte is Data Processing Executive at Best Buy Co. Inc. How they view these reports is through a system called MATRIX, which is a program which access is available to all managers and supervisors to help with business intelligence. This program gives a count of how many products are sold, when, to what types of customers, how much money was made for the day, week, month, year, and quarter.

          A data warehouse is logical collection information gathered from many different operational data bases used to create business intelligence that supports business analysis activities and decision making tasks. Best Buy Company won the data warehousing institute’s for its best practices in data warehousing award in the category performance management. Best buy won the award for its warehousing based business and vendor performance application. This warehouse provides web based and reporting capabilities to more than 2500 corporate and retail managers and also for external partners. Best buy data warehouse allows its users to view performance data, analysis on sales, inventory, advertising, pricing and all forms of problem area. The application facilitates increased efficiency in best buy overall business process. A data mart is a subset of a data warehouse in which only a focused portion of the data warehouse information is kept. Best buy has built a “business data mart” to use for customer analytics to focus on its business customer. This data mart helps best buy to target its customer groups and pick the right messages for each customer segment. For example, if one customer purchased a lot of items six month ago, and now purchases little, data mart helps to identify by doing deep drive analysis to discover differentiated groups with in its customers.

          Data Mining is “the practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns.” Best Buy uses data mining to analyze its customers buying trends and bases. The uses of data mining help Best Buy discover that women were being underserved. After that discovery, Best Buy put personal assistants to help female shoppers find the products that were on their shopping list. And the personal assistants would also give detailed information about the products they were interested in buying.  The software that Best Buy uses is Oracle. Oracle is a company that provides business software and hardware systems. Best Buy uses Oracle to “migrate data and applications from an acquired company's systems.” With the use of Oracle, Best Buy is able to get “full details of every point of sale transaction from every Best Buy retail store over the past two years.” Using Oracle requires fewer database administrator hours. This saves money and gives extra hours which can be put to use to develop new applications. The person who is responsible for this is Jeff Skochil, the manager of Oracle technical architecture. And he also receives help from Doug Reynolds, Information Services Leader.

Hardware

          Hardware “refers to any and all parts on, connected to, or about the computer that you can actually physically touch.” Some examples of hardware are mouse, keyboard and monitor.  Software is a collection of programs that gives the computer instructions on how to use them. Unlike hardware, software cannot be touched. They are three types of software. The three types are system, application and program software. 

                                                                                                                                            

          Best Buys sells Notebooks, Monitors, Printers, Desktops, Scanners and Fax machines, All-In-One, Mice and Keyboards, Memory, Speakers, Tablet PC, and Wireless Networking. Best Buy sells Best Buy sells many computer brands. The computers brands are: HP, Dell, Apple, Compaq, Asus, Gateway, Lenovo, Rain computers, eMachines, Lexmark, Sony, Alienware, Acer, Averatec, MSI, and ViewSonic. The types of computers that are sold at Best Buy are Desktops, Netbooks, All-In-One and Laptops. Michael A. Vitelli Named EVP, Customer Operating Groups is responsible for hardware and software. Mike is a graduate of Brooklyn College and a former CPA. As EVP of Customer Operating Group, Mike will be in charge of home solutions, entertainment operating groups, enterprise merchandising, PC mobility and Pacific Sales and Magnolia Audio Video.  

Michael A. Vitelli EVP, Customer Operating Groups

Software

          System software supports application software and controls how varies technology tools work together as we use our application software to perform specific information processing tasks. System software includes two basic categories: operating system software and utility software. Best buy sells Microsoft windows vista, Microsoft windows XP home, Microsoft windows XP professional. Best buy is selling now windows 7 home premium and windows 7 professional besides Mac os and other products. Fortunately, Linux is also a certain software package on the shelves of best buy for only $20.

          Application software is the software we use to meet our specific information processing needs, including payroll, customer relationship management, project management, training, word processing, and many, many others. Application software can be categorized as either productivity software or vertical and horizontal market software. Since June 2010 Microsoft office 2010 was available to consumer to purchase at all 1,081 best buy store locations in the U.S and online at Bestbuy.com.

Networks

          Best Buy uses both the internet and intranet. Intranet is guarded against outside access and is used only for employees with access to personal records, timesheets, and company information this intranet connects everyone from regular part time to the CEO. With this network Best Buys Stores are able to build business intelligence and make the customer experience better while increasing sales.