Currently, Wellcome Supermarket owns 170 stores as the first supermarket brand in Taiwan. For the purpose of competing with convenience stores and discount stores and expanding gaps with followers, Wellcome has substantially increased investment to improve category management and gradually update all stores and to strengthen IT performance since 2004. In the next few years, Wellcome expects to continue to be the leading position in Taiwan.
The core competitiveness in service sector is excellent service. To utilize valuable information, to maintain good customer relations and products management is the key factor to fulfill services into increasing profit. In recent years, IT industry created the concept of knowledge economy, enterprises' future success is the power to control knowledge energy, so for the chain stores, to analyze maintained industry know-how information and shared with enterprises and employees is the next level of strengthening enterprise core business intelligence, which is the best weapon to enlarge core competitiveness. For the same purpose, Wellcome has invested data warehouse (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) analysis to improve efficiency, Chao-Feng Cheng, chairman of Wellcome pointed out that 2005 is the year of Wellcome “Resources Integration”; even Wellcome is the market leader and still intended to make the company solid to be successful.
For the purpose of improving customer service quality and rapidly responding to market prices, Wellcome successfully upgraded store POS systems and background ERP (OLTP System), and found the existing ERP system already providing nearly 1,000 fixed reports, and was still unable to meet the marketing department's requirements. Parts of the users’ requirements were still relying on IT people to write programs to print out reports; this might create reports delivered timing problems. Report delivered in urgency and the output reports format were not flexible to create desired column, and different reports had different level of security mechanism; such repeated operations would greatly increase human maintenance costs in IT department, meanwhile, this may not be able to provide immediate real-time reports for marketing departments; this made marketing departments create their own Excel reports when there were immediate reports pressure.
To solving these difficulties, Wellcome had assessed two BI products, first product was the new structure ROLAP in MicroStrategy BI platform agent by FirstBI, and the other product was the traditional structure MOLAP in Cognos; due to MOLAP structure was still required IT staff to develop and maintain Cube types reports, so reports' heavy pressure was not reduced and the follow-up maintenance costs still rose. In result, Wellcome chose MicroStrategy as company's BI platform.
MicroStrategy is a complete business intelligence application platform, support for large data mart (VLDB) data processing and technology integration, and is designed to handle enterprise-class large volume data,; IT department is able to meet the requirements with smallest human resources, marketing department is able to create required reports by user friendly user interface in different level of security access rights and also capable to conduct multi-dimensional analysis. MicroStrategy platform was positioned as application center of report analysis by Wellcome; all the new required reports are all created in this BI platform, and also continually transferred the existing ERP system non-operation reports under MicroStrategy platform centralized management.
Chao-Feng Cheng, chairman of Wellcome considered in mature markets the leading brands in order to increase the gap between our competitors, continued to open stores was one strategy, but at the timing of continuing expanding stores, how to effectively control sales, revenue, growing trends and operation performance in each store. The big challenge were controlling marketing strategies anytime, allowing efficient procurement department keeping most safe inventory and controlling merchandise replenishment. Wellcome last year was still double digit growth performance in an overall fairly average market. With greatly invested business intelligence platform firstly among all the other supermarket companies, Wellcome expects to continue to expand business sales growth.
