Data Warehousing and Walmart

Data Warehousing and Mobile Computing

Walmart is the largest company in the world with the estimated one million customers every hour and more than 100 million customers every week. A large number of customer and gigantic supply chain make the company start using the RFID system to track moving items and manage the supply chains. However, the RFID produces gigantic datasets, which may be challenging to store in the relational database. To address this problem, Walmart develops the data warehousing to store the data, and the company derives cost benefits and data security benefits by transferring the data into the data warehousing. However, Walmart datasets continue to grow, and at present the data has reached 101 terabytes. A change in the business environment makes Walmart make a decision to transfer their data into the cloud. In the present competitive business environment, retail companies are looking for the strategies to cut costs and provide high-quality products at lower prices. Walmart transfers their data into the cloud to enjoy a massive cost reduction in business operations and achieves competitive market advantages.

Introduction

Walmart is a multinational and giant retail company with the headquarter in the United States. Operating in 28 countries, the company has 2.2 million employees making it the largest employer of labor in the world. Walmart also records 100 million customers every week. The company operates several chains of discounted supermarkets, hypermarkets, and grocery stores. According to 2016 Fortune 500, Walmart is the world largest company with the sales of $482.130 billion. In 2010, Walmart handles over one million customer data every hour and the data transactions in the company databases are equivalent of 2500 terabytes. The gigantic data generated from the sales makes Walmart develop a data warehousing to store and manage the data.

Research Questions

• What are the reasons that make Walmart develop the RFID data warehousing?

• What are the major benefits that Walmart derive from the RFID data warehousing?

• What are strategic factors that make Walmart store their data in the Cloud?

Literature Review

RFID consists of the EPC (electronic product code) used to track items, and application of the RFID has delivered competitive advantages to firms. Owunwanne, & Goel, (2016) argue that RFID technology has become an emerging valuable technology in the retail sector assisting in an inventory management and automating identification in the supply chains. The RFID is an inexpensive and small microchip that is attached to the objects, once attached, the small radio sends information about the object to the computer network. The RFID tags are stored in the Electronic Product Code used to identify an item in the supply chain. Typically, the RFID is the fastest growing dataset in the retail sector that assists in managing the supply chains, analyzing the logistic and product information to ensure that the products arrive at the right locations. Over the years, Walmart has taken the advantages of the RFID systems to manage the supply chains, and achieve the competitive market advantages.

Jamal, Omer, Qureshi (2013) point out that Walmart records estimated annual savings of $8.35 billion by transferring the RFID data into data warehouse. For example, the company is able to save approximately $600 million annually by meeting a timely delivery of customer demand using the real-time information from the RFID systems. Moreover, the company is able to save more than $180 million dollars from using the RFID for inventory. Walmart has also been able to save $575 million annually by using the RFID to monitor and track information of their product to prevent thefts and buyer frauds.

Walmart has also been able to derive the cost benefits from the RFID through the application of the RFID data warehousing suitable for the big datasets. The benefit of the data warehouse is that it helps knowledge workers such as managers, executives, and analysts to make better and faster decisions. Moreover, data warehousing supports the OLAP (online analytical processing) systems that contain a large amount of consolidated and historical data. Thus, the RFID data warehousing assists in integrating massive data from different data sources, and stored them historically, which assists in analyzing different aspects of businesses that include trend analysis, performance analysis, and prediction. Moreover, the RFID data warehousing enhances data consistency and data quality.

Despite the benefits that retail firms derive from RFID, the technology is not cost-effective because the application consists of components that include readers, networks, tags, and networked databases. The huge costs come from in-house professional services of the RFID systems that include the costs of architectural design, consulting services, integration, platform selection and installation. The barriers make many organizations face challenges in implementing the RFID for the business purpose. Moreover, RFID datasets consist of different characteristics that may be difficult to manage efficiently through the traditional database management systems. Moreover, firms may face extra costs of storing the big data physically, thus, the cloud computing using online servers assists in eliminating the costs of managing the traditional database systems.

Westerman, (2000) argues that Walmart data has reached 101 terabytes, and the data keep growing every day. Before Walmart developed its data warehousing, the company stored their data in the relational database. With the continuous growth of the data, the traditional relational database was unable to store the massive data generated from the RFID making the management develop the data warehouse to store its massive data. At present, the Walmart warehouse is the largest in the world. When Walmart built its data warehouse, the company started with 700 gigabytes of data consisting of sales data and RFID dataset. Presently, Walmart store different types of data that include inventory, customer, forecast, markdown, and demographic data. However, the operation costs of managing the data continue to grow, the company does not have an option but to transfer the data in the cloud. Moreover, the RFID generates a large volume of data that is challenging in storing in the traditional database systems, thus, the company takes the advantages of the cloud to store a large volume of data generate from the RFID tags.

The data of a company such as Walmart keep increasing every day. The volume of Walmart data is enormous and growing exponentially, and since the company's employee is located in several countries, thus, Walmart management believes that the best strategy to manage their big data is to transfer them to the cloud to enhance data mobility. The cloud computing is a technology that assists in launching application over the internet. Typically, the cloud is a powerful architecture that can be used to perform complex and large scale computing.

Additional, Walmart makes a decision to store their data in the cloud to meet a massive storage and processing capacity requirements. The company also believes that cloud technology assists in providing security access to data outside the corporate firewall. The cloud technology also delivers easy and fast scalability that support rapid application deployments. The cloud also supports the data integrity and quality because the data are placed in the hand of trained IT professionals. Walmart also transfers their data in the cloud to enjoy business intelligence capabilities, secure operational and deployment data environment. The cloud also assists the company to enjoy cost-effective solution from their vendors.

Application of the RFID in the cloud solves the cost escalation problems. (Napper, & Bientinesi, 2009). The cloud computing is defined as the computation resources accessible over the internet. Dabas, (2010) argue that the cloud computing is categorized as "Saas (software-as-a-service), infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service." (p 2). The Saas is a time-sharing model assisting many users to share the application. The Saas also leads to risk reduction and cost saving since firms will be able to eliminate the large-scale in-house capital expenditure with the RFID application. Walmart uses Openstack clouds to manage the data collected from eCommerce using the service oriented architecture to coordinate the integration of the systems. Moreover, Walmart uses the Oneops application lifecycle backed with the cloud infrastructures

Despite the benefits that Walmart derive from the RFID warehouse cloud computing, the company still faces the security issues. In the contemporary business environment, Walmart collects different types of data that include customer data, employee data, and suppliers' data. However, some data collected are sensitive that need to be protected from third party access. Thus, Walmart uses the SSL technology that includes the wildcard certificate to secure their cloud technologies. During the handshake process, the servers are configured to verify the common names in the server certificates and compare them with the hostnames on the server. If the there is no match, the server dropped the SSL connection. Moreover, the SSL wildcard certificate assists in securing multiple subdomains to secure consumer data.