THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF TANZANIA FACULTY OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

MBA, MHRM AND PGDBS PROGRAMMES: ICT IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT- OLG 652

TERM PAPER
This Term paper is based on this Knowledge Area (Database) and the Previous ones and carries
weight of 30 marks and consists of two parts i.e. Part A (10 marks) and Part B (20 marks). When
writing/responding the pages should not exceed 15 with 1.5 of spacing and font of Times New
Roman 12.

Part A: Given importance and provided areas of Mobile apps (below), please select two areas of
your interest and in each area find out from Google or apple store an app which is applicable to
Business Management at individual or enterprise level. Download each app in your smartphone
or tablet, study it & describe four ways in which it is beneficial to Business management from
institution and/or user point of view. Support your detailed description for each app by at least
three screenshots and at most four screenshots from your device where you will have installed,
used and observed them (10 marks).

Part B: Read Brazilian grocery giant stocks Case study and answer four (4) questions found at
the end of it (20 marks)
Brazilian grocery giant stocks customer knowledge for successful promotions after Brazil's
hyperinflation period ended in 1995. Retailers such as grocery giant Pão de Açúcar Group sought
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to guide their actions based on customer behavior. So, they began storing data from commercial
transactions and analyzing buying habits – and, as a result, placing a greater focus on customers.
The Pão de Açúcar Group uses SAS to streamline its campaign management processes and
increase its knowledge of customer preferences, making the organization a model for the use of
analytical intelligence in Brazilian retailing. With 597 retail food stores, 74 gas stations and 142
pharmacies generating gross sales of US$10 billion each year, the Pão de Açúcar Group is a
formidable, familiar presence in Brazil.

Many retailers still rely on customer surveys that generate databases full of valuable information,
which in turn gets lost or mishandled. Smarter companies organize information in analytical
databases and create automated processes to increase customer response rates and to simplify
decision-making. A common analytical practice is customer segmenting, where consumer
groups are identified and classified based on consumption profile similarities, not just on
characteristics such as age, gender, income or residence. This segmentation is widely used to
define the product mix for each store, as well as for customer relations strategies. A good
example of the use of customer segmentation and basket analysis is Pão de Açúcar's Mais
(More) customer-loyalty program, which identifies and analyzes the consumption profile of each
consumer. E.g., "Santos," a 40–year-old male customer, always buys bread, lunch meat and juice
when he shops at 8 p.m. each Wednesday and Saturday. Using basket analysis, the grocer knows
to include Santos in its next promotion for juice, because he is likely to respond favorably.

In Brazil, the Pão de Açúcar Group has been a leader in activities that seek to increase customer
knowledge and meet their needs. This goal led it to continue investing in tools that provided a
deeper & more analytical understanding of customer. When the grocer decided to expand the
Mais customer relationship program to support this strategy, CRM division implemented SAS
Marketing Automation for campaign management. According to Patrícia Harumi Tsuji,
Manager of Market & Consumer Knowledge for Pão de Açúcar Group, "SAS Campaign
Management helped with design of our processes. Before, when a team member left company,
their knowledge was lost. With SAS Campaign Management, that doesn't happen anymore. If
we want to review data next year, there's no problem – everything is centralized in the solution."

By implementing the solution, the department is able to achieve greater agility in a variety of
activities, such as filtering clientele and analyzing direct marketing campaigns. Things that they
used to do by hand are now automated. This saves time and creates a systematic manner of
working. According to Tsuji, the SAS solution adds uniformity to their processes, creates
patterns and automatically reduces the margin of error. Tsuji focuses on how the organization
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uses SAS and develops studies for all its brands. "It's a really crazy amount of information. To
give you an idea, there were 6 billion data points stored last year, and we were only able to
process them thanks to SAS solutions."

In addition, SAS Campaign Management can dynamically format files that are shared with
suppliers. The solution sends the files – such as direct mailings, e-mails and other customer
relations tools – in the proper layout and in a shorter amount of time. "Before SAS, we conducted
five media campaigns a month. After we implemented it, that number has jumped to 18," Tsuji
notes. For Cristina Serra, Director of Market and Consumer Knowledge, the sector faces certain
challenges. One of these is figuring out who the consumer is. "We really started to pay attention
to the makeup of receipts when we got SAS. Then, we implemented SAS Campaign
Management in order to integrate the whole analytical and campaign management component
and handle it in-house; previously this was handled by our agency, not in our own offices. We
wanted to centralize this knowledge, as well as design a campaign, select the clientele, put it into
practice, manage it and evaluate its performance and also learn from the past and apply what we
learned to future campaigns," explains Serra.

For Hugo Bethlem, Vice President of Supply Chains and IT for the Pão de Açúcar Group,
technological innovation involves looking for solutions that create better returns for stakeholders
in terms of productivity and data. “We use SAS for all our comprehensive intelligence and
analysis of register receipts, customer profiles and potential CRM activities that might be
developed to increase sales with greater profitability,” he says. “We’re on an adventure; we're
on the lookout for new technologies that are just starting to emerge on a global level, let alone
in Brazil, like handhelds were for in-home order deliveries in the 1990s.”

Case Study related Questions:

1. How the database was used in this case based on SAS solution for success of grocery giant
Pão de Açúcar Group? (3 marks)
2. Briefly describe what were the benefits realized by grocery giant Pão de Açúcar Group
because of using the database? (3 marks)
3. Briefly describe their future improvement plans. Also imagine if this was happening in the
current era of e-commerce, social media and advanced input/output devices, describe three
ways on how they could have used them & associated gained benefits (4 marks)
4. With five examples describe detailed to date applicability of such database and associated
benefits in in relevant institutions/industry/sectors in your country? (10 marks)