Question

Identify three companies that are using data mining tools. Explain how data mining has helped these companies with their bottom lines. Are data-mining tools beneficial to service companies or manufacturing or both?

Answer 1

Data mining helps to analyze data from different perspectives to generate new information. In other words, it is the process of examining huge databases to obtain new information. In today’s globalized world, data mining is used by many companies increase revenue, reduce costs, target the customer and identify potential customers, provide excellent customer service, and gain the competitive intelligence.

The three companies using data mining that would be here are: Amazon, Arby’s and McDonalds.

Amazon- Amazon use the strategy to collect information on intelligence and value pricing by data mining. Amazon provides a $5 off to whoever use the Amazon Price Check Mobile App. The customers use the app to scan the products in the store, text search the app to find the lowest price and also prompts the customers to update it with the in-store price. This information collected on the app facilitates Amazon to analyze the competitive trends and have a value pricing for its products. The data mining approach that has helped Amazon is the Basket analysis. This helps to predict consumer behavior. The Triple Bottom line (TBL) benefits are : People- competitive pricing to attract people; Profit- facilitates to increase revenue through increased sales, Planet- Saves the environment by adopting Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives based on analysis of consumer preferences.

Arby’s- This is a fast food company that benefits greatly from the data mining tools. The data mining tool is Tableau software which helps to determine the target for their advertisements. The company is able to analyze which advertisement is effective among the customers while they see the channels. This helps them to make ad pitch effective. This software helps Arby’s to determine which channel is effective for their ads so that it increases the number of leads for their business. TBL- People- The right set of target people are determined as leads; Profit- Increased number of leads results in increased business thus making it a profitable business; Planet- They also determine how consumers prefer the way the environment should be treated and act accordingly.

McDonalds- The largest fast food chain serves more than 8 million people globally with 34000 restaurants. This immense customer inflow and their preferences are analyzed with data mining tool JMP software. This software helps McDonalds to analyze the immense data to determine the customer insights to improve their operations across the global operations. This helps them to provide excellent customer service. Data mining helps the company to analyze on factors such as wait times, menu information, ordering pattern, preferences for the employee, etc. TBL: Profit- Increases the already immense profit in the company, People – customers get greater customer satisfaction through its improved operations, Planet- Has implemented CPR initiatives based on consumer insights obtained through data mining.

Data mining is useful to both manufacturing and service companies because any amount of large data is analyzed to help the business take strategic decisions to gain the competitive advantage.