Business intelligence tools have been making their way into the hands of non-analysts for some time, a trend that Starbucks has been pioneering. The coffee behemoth is now trying out new BI technology to enable store managers to make faster decisions based on data coming in via mobile devices, reports Doug Henschen at InformationWeek.

There are plenty of BI tools that help retailers track things like inventory, sales and staff schedules, but the technology Starbucks is testing from MicroStrategy also lets managers take actions--such as ordering supplies--in the same application. If, for example, an unanticipated event were to become known a day ahead of time, managers may need to quickly adjust their inventory or staffing levels.

Starbucks has been using MicroStrategy technology since 2005, and approximately 40,000 of its employees access the BI tools. MicroStrategy just rolled out the Transaction Services feature in its BI platform. The coffee chain hopes to give store managers a way to interact with supply chain and human resources systems from the BI platform on mobile devices, rather than having to go into the ERP system or other dashboards.

"We look at BI as the hub where we correlate information from many different systems," said Tom Ball, the lead BI platform development executive at Starbucks. "To move the analytic action to SAP or another app takes us back a step."

For more:
- see Doug Henschen's article at InformationWeek

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