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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. 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.
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
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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…
Reference
Dabas, C. (2010). A Cloud Computing Architecture Framework for Scalable RFID. Proceeding of the International Multi-Conference of Engineers and Computer Scientists. 1. IMECS.
Foote, P.S. & Malini, K. (2001). Forecasting using data warehousing model: Walmart's experience. The Journal of Business Forecasting Methods & Systems.20(3): 13-17.
Jamal, S.M.K. Omer, A. & Qureshi, A.B.S. (2013). Cloud Computing Solution and Services for RFID-Based Supply Chain Management. Advances in Internet of Things, 3:79-85.
Napper, J. & Bientinesi, P. (2009). Can Cloud Computing reach the top 500? UCHPC -- MAN '09. Proceedings of the Combined Workshops on Unconventional High-Performance Computing Workshops Plus Memory Access Workshop: 17-20.
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