Business Analytics Opportunity
Scenario:
You recently inherited your grandfather’s coffee shop, which is conveniently located in downtown East Lansing. The cafe offers many different kinds of coffee and tea, a full service bakery, and sandwiches, soups, and salads. Your grandfather first opened the coffee shop in 1952 and it was a local hotspot for many years.
Although your grandfather’s coffee shop was a local hotspot for many years, business has been steadily declining over the last five years. Although your grandfather was an expert at running the coffee shop, it is outdated. There are no computers in the store and all ordering takes place manually. Your grandfather had a terrific memory and knew all of his customers by name, but unfortunately, none of this information is located anywhere in the store. The family recipes for the baked goods and soups are also stored in your grandfather’s memory. Inventory is tracked in a note pad, along with employee payroll, and marketing coupons. The Cafe does not have a Web site, uses very little marketing except word-of-mouth, and essentially still operates the same as it did in 1952.
You will own and operate your grandfather’s coffee shop, taking advantage of business practices discussed in our ITM 309 class to increase profits, keep the business running, and bring the cafe into the 21st century. One of your first decisions is to define a new business strategy for your grandfather’s coffee shop and introduce IT to enable the strategy and enhance operations. Example IT improvements may include automating inventory updating and payroll, keeping track of customer information, creating a coffee shop website for promotion and offers, recording the recipes in a database, and offering Wi-Fi.

Business Analytics Opportunity Part:
Business intelligence or business analytics is a broad, general term describing information that people use to support their decision-making efforts. To execute your business strategy you should have full knowledge of your coffee shop strengths and weaknesses and full knowledge of the competitor strengths and weaknesses. Lack of either one might result in failure.
Background:
You understand that database and data analytics technology can dramatically improve your ability to analyze information and assist you in implementing and tracking your strategic plans for the cafe. You will need to first determine the information required from your coffee shop databases and then design the required data analytics technology.
Task:
The tasks associated with the business analytics opportunity outline your approach to using information to strategically track your business performance:
Document the database information found in all of your coffee shop databases and determine which selected information should be collected as the key measurements for your data analytics opportunity. You do not need to build the database; rather, explain the key data elements to include in the database.
Describe how you would discern patterns and meaning in the information using your initial business analytics technology application. You do not need to use business analytics software to do this task; rather, conceptually discuss your business analytics proposal.
Describe how you would apply your data analytics technology to track and implement your business strategy for your coffee shop.