Please visit the website of any publicly traded company of your choice (via web search or www.sc.gov) and identify and provide two (2) examples of the decisions that the company’s senior executives made using data to achieve various goals (business expansion, merge, acquisition, increase success and profitability, and the like) Explain how you believe the data influenced the decision.2nd Respose:

1st post:

The company I chose to write about this week is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer with 10,500 stores in 24 countries operating around the globe. Wal-Mart also employs 2.3 million associates internationally with 1.6 million in the United States alone. All of this to say that Wal-Mart is a prime example of a company that is ripe for using data to driven business decisions to increase success and profitability.

In 2004 before Hurricane Frances made landfall Wal-Mart used predictive data analysis to forecast certain products would sell at a higher rate. This may seem like common sense in some areas such as bottled water, batteries, first aid supplies ect. But Wal-Mart used data from previous hurricanes to predict that products such as strawberry Pop-Tarts would sell at seven times their normal rate.

By having data from previous hurricane sales Wal-Mart is not only able to know what products to stock like water (obvious) but how much supply of a supply increase may be needed. By using past sales in areas affected by the Hurricane they can nail down the exactly what kind of products sells and how much. In areas of common sense like the aforementioned products like bottled water, batters, first aid it is crucial that they capitalize on the data to ensure people in those areas are properly supplied.

Resources

Provost, F., & Fawcett, T. (2013, February 13). Data Science and its relationship to big data and data . liebertpub. Retrieved April 4, 2022, from https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/big.2013.1508

About. Corporate. (n.d.). Retrieved April 4, 2022, from https://corporate.walmart.com/about

Mohanty, S., Jagadeesh, M., & Srivatsa, H. (2013). Big Data Imperatives Enterprise ‘big data’ warehouse, ‘bi’ implementations and analytics. Springer.

For this week’s discussion, I will focus on how Costco uses data to aid decision-making management. Costco wholesale corporation is an American multinational corporation that operates as a warehouse club. As of 2020, Costco was the fifth largest retailer in the world. Costco runs many warehouses across the globe, meaning that senior management’s decision-making may vary from one site to another and from one situation to another (Cottrell, n.d). Data analysis is the science of collecting data, organizing, and analyzing large data sets to discover patterns and other valuable information for the business. Costco consistently relies on data and analytics for better decision-making at the management level (Baker, 2018). The data is retrieved from the company’s databases for analysis, and the insights are then used for implementing better-informed decisions (Cottrell, n.d). In 2020, Costco used online data to update the food court menu were in one location; there was a price change from $1 to $1.49. the jump in size was matched by an increased number of customers and high demand for the commodities. During the covid 19 pandemic, Costco started testing curbside pick up and same-day delivery for members in New Mexico, where goods were delivered outside their vehicle for a minimum order of one hundred dollars. The customers must pay a delivery fee of ten dollars (Abusalma, 2021). After realizing that many businesses are moving towards the same-day delivery shift, the senior management decided. The administration has not yet indicated whether the same-day delivery will be available to other parts of the country. Other nonperishable items are delivered within two days, apart from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska (Abusalma, 2021).

References

Abusalma, A. (2021). The role of strategic innovation for the sustainability of businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Management Science Letters, 1991-1998. https://doi.org/10.5267/j.msl.2021.3.010

Baker, A. J. (2018). Decision theories and business decision-making. Business Decision Making, 48-69. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315122496-3

Cottrell, M. (n.d.). Costco wholesale. Encyclopedia of Business in Today’s World. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412964289.n239