By Dr. Werner Hopf, CEO, Dolphin Enterprise Solutions Corp.
Believe it or not, the holiday shopping season is upon us all. For retailers – both brick and mortar and online-only alike – this is the time you’ve been working towards all year along. The National Retail Federation is predicting that combined November and December spending will increase more than four percent this year to top $616 billion. In addition, online sales are expected to jump as much as 11% year-to-year.
In 2014, data is the lifeblood of a retail organization. It has the power to propel you ahead of the competition, but it can also grind business to a halt. In the SAP environment – one quite familiar to many retailers– the difference between the two is an effective Data Volume Management strategy for your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform. Without a Data Volume Management strategy in place, database growth is left unchecked which can result in three distinct problems. If your company is besieged by one or more of these issues, it is time to consider a new approach.
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- Performance grinds to a halt: Too much data will bog down performance and create bottlenecks. This leads to user frustration as simple queries and critical sales reports or analytics take longer to execute. If it performance problems bleeds into customer facing activities, such as inventory searches, sales can be negatively impacted.
- Too much downtime: Many retailers operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even if their physical locations are closed, shopping is easier than ever thanks to mobile technologies. This means there is never a good time to bring systems down for maintenance. Processing large volumes of data in a short amount of time can put pressure on systems and result in too much system downtime. Retailers cannot afford downtime at the time of year when every sale is important to make the year a profitable one.
- Total Cost of Ownership soars: For organizations that continually encounter the first two concerns, a solution may be throw more hardware at the problem. Bigger systems and more memory provide only a quick fix. Adding more hardware will quickly grow into an unsustainable practice that consumes IT budgets leaving few resources to carry out other important projects.
When implementing a Data Volume Management strategy to combat these issues, it’s important to begin by recognizing that not all data is created equal. Some data, such as that used for critical sales reports and analytics, will yield more value than other transactional data. Separate the high value data from data that is simply being retained to meet compliance requirements.
As this exercise is completed, a natural roadmap determining which data should be kept online and what data can be archived will emerge. At this stage, an appropriate storage architecture can be designed that will maximize business needs by keeping the most important information in the live database; less frequently accessed information in more affordable “nearline” storage; and the least accessed data, such as that retained for audit purposes, in an archive.
A Data Volume Management strategy isn’t intended to serve as a one-time effort to free up resources. It is an ongoing process that needs to be a priority, particularly in retail, where businesses process large volumes of data. Now, new tools are available to provide benchmarking in this area. One is an Information Lifecycle Management dashboard for SAP systems which not only measures performance against internal goals, but also aggregates the performance of other anonymous enterprises to provide CIOs, CFOs, and other executives improved visibility into how they’re scoring against other businesses. This dashboard provides a way for management to understand how data volume is impacting the business, so they stay motivated even after the initial euphoria of increased processing speeds and terabytes of free storage wears off.
Retailers will likely create more data during the holidays this year than any other holiday shopping season. Businesses will be put to the test and the ability to cope with the increasing data demands will affect the number of sales and the bottom line. Organizations using this peak period to conduct their own holiday data healthcheck will discover new, actionable insights to make 2015 even better.
Dr. Werner Hopf is the CEO of Dolphin Enterprise Solutions Corporation. He is responsible for setting the company’s strategy corporate direction and serves as the Archiving Principal. With more than 20 years of experience in the information technology industry, including more than 15 focused on SAP, Dr. Hopf is well known for his expertise in SAP technology platforms.
