A Case In Point: Coffee Anyone?
Take the case of a national coffee retailer who wants to understand the
multiple variables driving sales throughout the year.
Using conventional reporting or OLAP tools, the retailer might produce
a spreadsheet or graph that shows sales figures per month by region.
But is that enough information to help drive sales even higher?
What if the retailer wants to overlay that basic data with other sales
influencers such as time of day, weather conditions, coffee varieties in
stock, special in-store promotions and the relative effectiveness of
service staff on different shifts? For that, the typical business intelligence
tool might not be quite intelligent enough.
That kind of sophisticated and critical analysis calls for Visual Numerics.