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Introduction
Retail Insights offers cloud-based rich business intelligence solution to retail industry users. Retail Insights is built on top of the latest Oracle technology stack and utilizes Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) the data and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) for end user reporting and analysis needs.
Retail Insights architecture is designed to meet the retail industry’s business intelligence needs in both program and report performance.
The main characteristics of the Retail Insights product are:
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Rich Reporting Capabilities: Retail Insights offers report creation capabilities in two different flavors: Historical (As Was) and Current (As Is) in same environment. Packaged reports are provided as reference examples for users to create their own customized reports according to their needs.
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Comprehensive Solution: Retail Insights includes an end-to-end solution for reporting and BI needs of the retailer by providing data integration with source applications, transforming and loading the fact and dimension data, rolling up the data for improved query performance, Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for report creation, shell scripts for setting up the batch schedule, and an automated installer by following business intelligence best practices.
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Performant ETL Code: Retail Insights data processing tool, ODI, offers high performance for the database batch processes on Oracle database.
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Performant Reports: Retail Insights metadata is built using Oracle Analytics and are designed to work in complex reporting scenarios.
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Robust Data Model: Retail Insights data model is designed for supporting a retailers’ data needs in a business intelligence environment. Data model elements are designed to work with Oracle Analytics architecture.
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Packaged Integrations: Retail Insights data model is leveraged for many down-stream applications such as the Retail AI Foundation Cloud Services with built-in integrations and data flows.
Business Intelligence and Retail Insights
This section briefly explains the fundamentals of business intelligence and data warehousing in general. It is important to understand the overall architecture and data flow for implementing Retail Insights.
Business intelligence includes the processes, methods, and technologies adopted by organizations to answer complex business questions and for building comprehensive decision support systems. These systems help organizations in maintaining secure, conformed, and highly available data for all levels of users from top executives who make decisions based on corporate level information to managers/analysts who analyze their area and take actions based on the information.
Business intelligence is built using several processes and applications that maintain these processes by adopting latest tools and technologies. One of the main components of business intelligence is a data warehouse. A data warehouse is the repository that stores the data