Canadian Tire Corporation (ctc) Case Study

In 21st century as the economies are growing globally, companies in all industries have started to expand to meet people's need. In the recent years, information technology revolution was a major factor that assisted companies to maintain their businesses effectively by increasing their market size to reach a wide range of customers and consequently increase their profit margins.

By Using different types of Information Systems including; Transaction processing systems, followed by Management information systems, Decision support systems and ending with Executive information systems, organizations realized the value of operating and implementing these systems within their businesses. As the market has grown and pressures have increased, businesses have started taking advantage of more powerful and developed information systems that resulted in the development of "Business Intelligence" systems.

Business intelligence has been developed from the Decision Support Systems. Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as systems that combine data gathering, data storage, and knowledge management with analytical tools; reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to present complex internal and external competitive information to planners and decision makers. Implicit in this definition is the concept that BI systems provide actionable information delivered at the right time, at the right location, and in the right form to help decision makers to make the right decisions. The improvement in business agility that comes with business intelligence is crucial in most cases, and allows a company to take good competitive advantage of constantly evolving market. After taking a brief idea about BI and its benefits in businesses, let's discuss in details how BI can help Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) to run their five group companies in an effective manner.

Taking Business Intelligence initiative was not an easy task at Canadian Tire as it impacted the businesses processes, the organization structure, and the whole infrastructure. Canadian Tire planned to implement BI at the same time of running their businesses as they are without any effect on their business transactions. Operating BI system in such a big corporation would have enormous positive improvements across the whole organization's businesses. As it is explained in the case that every group of the company has its own data and its own system of processing it. So, implementing BI system could help Canadian Tire to better managing the data from all the sub companies in an efficient way by integrating and engineering most of these systems to work together. As mentioned in the case CTC lines of business are operating on different operation systems, hardware platforms, software and end user applications. Merging and integrating these systems would help CTC not only in managing data effectively, but also in improving quality of their services and saving costs of maintenance of these various information systems. In addition, having BI system at CTC would help them to: enhance their reactions and services toward their customers, accurately identify their customer demands, improve optimality their internal operations, study the market better for future prospects, and to utilize time and resources