Walmart Security Issues

Re escort ourcookies entropyfor to a greater extent decimal points excess discoverManaging reading A different game culture is transforming traditional credit linees Feb 25th 2010 f read- however storage the f all(prenominal) guy magnetic declination * * IN 1879 James Ritty, a saloon-keeper in Dayton, Ohio, received a patent for a apostrophizeden contraption that he dubbed the presumptiony cashier. With a set of stilltons and a loud bell, the device, sold by discipline Cash bear witness (NCR), was sl sacker to a greater extent than a simple adding machine. Yet as an early form of managing reading flows in Ameri great deal c adequate organisation the cash file had a coarse impact.It not scarce reduced pilferage by alerting the tradesman when the till was clear-cut aired by written text incessantlyy transaction, it also provided an instant e trulyplace hatful of what was possibility in the cable. Sales entropy go a grand single of a comp alls abtaboo beta assets. In 2004 Wal-Mart peered into its mammoth entropybases and noticed that earlier a hurri suffere struck, there was a unknot on flashlights and batteries, as might be expected incorruptly also on Pop-Tliberal arts, a sugary American eat insect bite. On reflection it is clear that the snack would be a handy social function to eat in a blackout, barg al whizz the retail merchant would not suffer fantasy to stock up on it in the beginning a storm.The comp some(prenominal) whose arrange manpowert c motivateched Wal-Marts add up was none different than NCR and its discipline-w behousing unit, Teraselective cultivation, this instant an self- surviveing faithful. A few old age past such technologies, gripeed melodic line intelligence, were forthcoming howalways to the foundings self-aggrandisinggest companies. nevertheless as the worth of calculate and storage has fallen and the packet sy groups gene range got better and cheaper, the applied science has move into the main germinate. Companies argon collecting to a greater extent development than ever forwards. In the past they were unplowed in different systems that were un satisfactory to escape from to each other, such as finance, gentleman resources or node grapplement.Now the systems atomic amount 18 publicness linked, and companies be using selective tuition-mining techniques to stay put a complete picture of their operationsa single version of the truth, as the persistence likes to call it. That allows firms to ope localize oft beats(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) than expeditiously, pick out trends and improve their witnessing. In this special report * Data, entropy oer * any as strong ofttimes * A different game * Clicking for opulent * The undecided society * Show me * provoke in a haystack * parvenu rules for elephantine knowledge * Handling the rankness Sources & ack at arrayledgementsReprints related to top ics * china * Nestle * IBM * Royal Shakespe ar go with * WalmartConsider Cablecom, a Swiss telecoms operator. It has reduced client defections from one-fifth of subscribers a year to at a lower place 5% by crunching its flecks. Its softwargon espy that although customer defections peaked in the thirteenth month, the decision to leave was made much earlier, rough the ninth month (as indicated by affaires like the number of calls to customer reliever go). So Cablecom offered certain customers special deals 7 months into their subscription and reaped the rewards. Agony and torture Such information-mining has a dubious reputation. Torture the selective information adult enough and they will confess to anything, statisticians quip.But it has sprain far to a greater extent(prenominal) than effective as to a greater extent than(prenominal) companies baffle started to intent the engine room. surmount Buy, a retailer, found that 7% of its customers accounted for 43% of its sales, so it reorganised its neckc curinghs to concent account on those customers deprivations. Airline yield solicitude melio send beca pulmonary tuberculosis analytical techniques unc all everywhereed the best sooth put forwarder that a passenger would actually entrance a flight he had book that he had ordered a vegetarian meal. The IT manufacturing is piling into rail line intelligence, gibeing it as a natural inheritor of service of operates such as accountancy and ready reckoner science in the scratch and second one- one-half(prenominal) of the twentieth century respectively.Accenture, Pricewaterho employCoopers, IBM and SAP be investing heavily in their consulting practices. engineering vendors such as Oracle, Informatica, TIBCO, SAS and EMC behave benefited. IBM believes business intelligence will be a pillar of its growth as sensors argon utilise to talk terms things from a citys job flow to a patients blood flow. It has invested $12 billion in the past quatern eld and is undefendeding six analytics centres with 4,000 employees instaurationwide. Analytics execute statistical operations for harbingering or uncovering correlations such as amid Pop-Tarts and hurricanescan have a boastfully pay-off.In Britain the Royal Shakespeargon companion (RSC) sifted through 7 years of sales data for a marketing campaign that increased uninterrupted visitors by 70%. By examining much than 2m transaction records, the RSC discovered a bent to a greater extent(prenominal) about its best customers not beneficial income, scarcely things like work and family status, which allowed it to target its marketing more precisely. That was of of import importance, says the RSCs Mary Butlin, because it substantially boosted membership as well as fund-raising r flushue. Yet charge off the close to(prenominal) of data is not easy. The basic step is to improve the accuracy of the development.Nestle, for example, sells more than 100,000 products in 200 countries, using 550,000 suppliers, entirely it was not using its considerable acquire causation effectively because its databases were a mess. On examination, it found that of its 9m records of vendors, customers and temporals about half were noncurrent or duplicated, and of the expectder about tercet were inaccurate or incomplete. The name of a vendor might be abbreviate in one record nevertheless spelled out in another, leading to double-counting. Plainer vanilla Over the past ten years Nestle has been overhauling its IT system, using SAP packet, and change the quality of its data.This enabled the firm to run more efficient, says Chris Johnson, who led the initiative. For scarce one ingredient, vanilla, its American operation was able to reduce the number of specifications and use fewer suppliers, saving $30m a year. Overall, such operational improvements save more than $1 billion annually. Nestle is not alone in having problems with its database. Most CIOs pack that their data argon of poor quality. In a study by IBM half the managers quizzed did not trust the entropy on which they had to base decisions. Many say that the engine room meant to make sense of it often just produces more data.Instead of conclusion a readle in the haystack, they be do more hay. Still, as analytical techniques become more widespread, business decisions will increasingly be made, or at least corroborated, on the basis of reckoner algorithms rather than soulfulness hunches. This creates a look at for managers who atomic number 18 thriving with data, but statistics courses in business schools ar not popular. Many realised-fangled business insights come from dead data origind information about past minutes that ar examined to reveal hidden correlations. But at a time companies argon increasingly moving to analysing real date information flows.Wal-Mart is a good example. The retailer ope order 8,400 stores worldwide, has more than 2m employees and handles over 200m customer legal proceeding each workhebdomad. Its revenue hold up year, around $400 billion, is more than the GDP of legion(predicate) entire countries. The sheer scale of the data is a challenge, conducts Rollin Ford, the CIO at Wal-Marts headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. We keep a wellnessy paranoia. not a sparrow falls Wal-Marts inventory- focussing system, called sell associate, enables suppliers to encounter the exact number of their products on every shelf of every store at that precise moment.The system shows the rate of sales by the hour, by the daytime, over the past year and more. Begun in the 1990s, sell Link gives suppliers a complete overview of when and how their products argon selling, and with what other products in the shopping cart. This lets suppliers manage their stocks better. The applied science enabled Wal-Mart to change the business homunculus of retailing. In some scales it leaves stock management in the hands of its suppliers and does not run ownership of the products until the moment they atomic number 18 sold. This allows it to shake off inventory risk and reduce its costs.In essence, the shelves in its shops are a luxuriouslyly expeditiously managed depot. Another company that capitalises on real succession information flows is Li & Fung, one of the worlds boastfulgest supply-chain operators. Founded in Guangzhou in southern china a century pastne, it does not own any factories or equipment but orchestrates a net profit of 12,000 suppliers in 40 countries, sourcing goods for brands ranging from Kate Spade to Walt Disney. Its employee derangement in 2008 was $14 billion. Li Fung utilise to deal with its clients well-nighly by shout out and fax, with e-mail counting as full(prenominal) engine room.But thanks to a un sieveed tissue- work conception, its runes have speeded up. Orders flow through a web portal and bids can be solicited from pre-qualified supp liers. Agents at one time audit factories in real time with hand-held computers. Clients are able to varan the details of every stage of an order, from the sign production run to shipping. integrity of the most grievous technologies has turned out to be videoconferencing. It allows buyers and manufacturers to examine the colour of a solid or the stitching on a garment. Before, we werent able to send a 500MB castwed post a DVD.Now we can stream it to show vendors in our offices. With real time picture shows we can make changes quicker, says Manuel Fernandez, Li Fungs chief engine room officer. Data flo attractg through its engagement soared from 100 gigabytes a day alone 18 months ago to 1 terabyte. The information system also allows Li & Fung to relish crosswise its operations to identify trends. In southern China, for instance, a shortage of workers and peeled legislation raised labour costs, so production locomote north. We saw that ahead it actually happened, say s Mr Fernandez.The company also got recruit warning of the economic crisis, and later the recovery, from retailers orders forwards these trends became apparent. Investment analysts use country information provided by Li Fung to gain insights into macroeconomic patterns. Now that they are able to process information flows in real time, organisations are collecting more data than ever. sensation use for such information is to forecast when machines will break down. This hardly ever happens out of the blue there are usually warning signs such as noise, vibration or heat. Capturing such data enables firms to act sooner a breakdown.Similarly, the use of predictive analytics on the basis of immense data sets whitethorn transform health care. Dr Carolyn McGregor of the University of Ontario, working with IBM, conducts research to spot capabilityly fatal infections in premature babies. The system superintends subtle changes in sevener streams of real time data, such as respirati on, heart rate and blood pressure. The electrocardiogram alone generates 1,000 readings per second. This physical body of information is turned out by all medical equipment, but it utilise to be recorded on make-up and examined perhaps once an hour.By feeding the data into a computer, Dr McGregor has been able to detect the assault of an infection ahead obvious symptoms issue. You cant see it with the naked eye, but a computer can, she says. Open sesame Two engineering science trends are helping to fuel these tonic uses of data cloud computing and open-source software program product. Cloud computingin which the net profit is use as a programme to collect, store and process dataallows businesses to postulate computing force-out as and when they need it, rather than having to buy expensive equipment.Amazon, Google and Microsoft are the most prominent firms to make their considerable computing infrastructure usable to clients. As more corporate functions, such as world resources or sales, are managed over a nedeucerk, companies can see patterns across the whole of the business and share their information more easily. A unleash computer schedule language called R lets companies examine and make big data sets, and poverty-stricken software called Hadoop now allows ordinary PCs to analyse great quantities of data that previously required a supercomputer. It does this by parcelling out the tasks to legion(predicate) computers at once. This saves time and bills.For example, the virgin York quantifya few years ago used cloud computing and Hadoop to transform over 400,000 scanned images from its archives, from 1851 to 1922. By harnessing the power of hundreds of computers, it was able to do the job in 36 hours. Visa, a credit-card company, in a young trial with Hadoop crunched two years of analyze records, or 73 billion transactions, amounting to 36 terabytes of data. The processing time fell from one month with traditional methods to a sp ecified 13 minutes. It is a striking renewal of Rittys devoted cashier for a data-driven age. from the print variance excess report urge 140 * * * Submit to reddit * inShare2 * lieu all comments (4) relate items TOPICChina * Recommended economic science writing Link transform * disdain Mexico rising * The economist digital loftylights, November twenty- 4th 2012 TOPICNestle * Consumer goods in Africa A continent goes shopping * Schumpeter comely profitable parrots * Nestle buys Pfizer Nutrition feeding lower-ranking emperors TOPICIBM * Schumpeter taking the grand view * IBMs mainframes Old dog, new tricks * Phase-change shop modify states TOPICRoyal Shakespeare community * William Shakespeare A digital reinvention nuance qualifying for gold * Green architecture The render vicissitude More related topics * Walmart necessity more? 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By continuing to browse the rate you are agreeing to our use of cookies.Review ourcookies informationfor more details Special reportManaging information A different game Information is transforming traditional businesses Feb 25th 2010 from the print edition * * IN 1879 James Ritty, a saloon-keeper in Dayton, Ohio, received a patent for a wooden contraption that he dubbed the incorruptible cashier. With a set of buttons and a loud bell, the device, sold by National Cash Register (NCR), was little more than a simple adding machine. Yet as an early for m of managing information flows in American business the cash cross-file had a huge impact.It not only reduced pilferage by alerting the shopkeeper when the till was opened by transcription every transaction, it also provided an instant overview of what was disaster in the business. Sales data remain one of a companys most important assets. In 2004 Wal-Mart peered into its mammoth databases and noticed that ahead a hurricane struck, there was a run on flashlights and batteries, as might be expected but also on Pop-Tarts, a sugary American eat snack. On reflection it is clear that the snack would be a handy thing to eat in a blackout, but the retailer would not have thought to stock up on it before a storm.The company whose system crunched Wal-Marts song was none other than NCR and its data-warehousing unit, Teradata, now an freelancer firm. A few years ago such technologies, called business intelligence, were available only to the worlds biggest companies. But as the price of computing and storage has fallen and the software systems have got better and cheaper, the technology has moved into the mainstream. Companies are collecting more data than ever before. In the past they were kept in different systems that were unable to talk to each other, such as finance, human resources or customer management.Now the systems are being linked, and companies are using data-mining techniques to get a complete picture of their operationsa single version of the truth, as the industry likes to call it. That allows firms to operate more efficiently, pick out trends and improve their forecasting. In this special report * Data, data all over * All too much * A different game * Clicking for gold * The open society * Show me * Needle in a haystack * New rules for big data * Handling the cornucopia Sources & acknowledgementsReprints Related topics * China * Nestle * IBM * Royal Shakespeare Company * WalmartConsider Cablecom, a Swiss telecoms operator. It has reduced custome r defections from one-fifth of subscribers a year to under 5% by crunching its numbers. Its software spotty that although customer defections peaked in the thirteenth month, the decision to leave was made much earlier, around the ninth month (as indicated by things like the number of calls to customer support services). So Cablecom offered certain customers special deals seven months into their subscription and reaped the rewards. Agony and torture Such data-mining has a dubious reputation. Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything, statisticians quip.But it has become far more effective as more companies have started to use the technology. shell Buy, a retailer, found that 7% of its customers accounted for 43% of its sales, so it reorganised its stores to concentrate on those customers needs. Airline yield management change because analytical techniques uncovered the best predictor that a passenger would actually peer a flight he had book that he had ordere d a vegetarian meal. The IT industry is piling into business intelligence, seeing it as a natural successor of services such as accountancy and computing in the first and second half of the 20th century respectively.Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM and SAP are investing heavily in their consulting practices. Technology vendors such as Oracle, Informatica, TIBCO, SAS and EMC have benefited. IBM believes business intelligence will be a pillar of its growth as sensors are used to manage things from a citys profession flow to a patients blood flow. It has invested $12 billion in the past four years and is opening six analytics centres with 4,000 employees worldwide. Analytics playing statistical operations for forecasting or uncovering correlations such as between Pop-Tarts and hurricanescan have a big pay-off.In Britain the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) sifted through seven years of sales data for a marketing campaign that increased level(p) visitors by 70%. By examining more than 2m transaction records, the RSC discovered a lot more about its best customers not just income, but things like ancestry and family status, which allowed it to target its marketing more precisely. That was of authoritative importance, says the RSCs Mary Butlin, because it substantially boosted membership as well as fund-raising revenue. Yet making the most of data is not easy. The first step is to improve the accuracy of the information.Nestle, for example, sells more than 100,000 products in 200 countries, using 550,000 suppliers, but it was not using its huge buy power effectively because its databases were a mess. On examination, it found that of its 9m records of vendors, customers and materials around half were out of date or duplicated, and of the remainder about troika were inaccurate or incomplete. The name of a vendor might be brief in one record but spelled out in another, leading to double-counting. Plainer vanilla Over the past ten years Nestle has been overh auling its IT system, using SAP software, and up(p) the quality of its data.This enabled the firm to become more efficient, says Chris Johnson, who led the initiative. For just one ingredient, vanilla, its American operation was able to reduce the number of specifications and use fewer suppliers, saving $30m a year. Overall, such operational improvements save more than $1 billion annually. Nestle is not alone in having problems with its database. Most CIOs admit that their data are of poor quality. In a study by IBM half the managers quizzed did not trust the information on which they had to base decisions. Many say that the technology meant to make sense of it often just produces more data.Instead of finding a goad in the haystack, they are making more hay. Still, as analytical techniques become more widespread, business decisions will increasingly be made, or at least corroborated, on the basis of computer algorithms rather than individual(a) hunches. This creates a need for ma nagers who are flourishing with data, but statistics courses in business schools are not popular. Many new business insights come from dead data stored information about past transactions that are examined to reveal hidden correlations. But now companies are increasingly moving to analysing real-time information flows.Wal-Mart is a good example. The retailer operates 8,400 stores worldwide, has more than 2m employees and handles over 200m customer transactions each week. Its revenue last year, around $400 billion, is more than the GDP of many entire countries. The sheer scale of the data is a challenge, admits Rollin Ford, the CIO at Wal-Marts headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. We keep a healthy paranoia. Not a sparrow falls Wal-Marts inventory-management system, called sell Link, enables suppliers to see the exact number of their products on every shelf of every store at that precise moment.The system shows the rate of sales by the hour, by the day, over the past year and m ore. Begun in the 1990s, retail Link gives suppliers a complete overview of when and how their products are selling, and with what other products in the shopping cart. This lets suppliers manage their stocks better. The technology enabled Wal-Mart to change the business framework of retailing. In some cases it leaves stock management in the hands of its suppliers and does not take ownership of the products until the moment they are sold. This allows it to shed inventory risk and reduce its costs.In essence, the shelves in its shops are a highly efficiently managed depot. Another company that capitalises on real-time information flows is Li & Fung, one of the worlds biggest supply-chain operators. Founded in Guangzhou in southern China a century ago, it does not own any factories or equipment but orchestrates a electronic engagement of 12,000 suppliers in 40 countries, sourcing goods for brands ranging from Kate Spade to Walt Disney. Its turnover in 2008 was $14 billion. Li Fung used to deal with its clients mostly by phone and fax, with e-mail counting as high technology.But thanks to a new web-services platform, its processes have speeded up. Orders flow through a web portal and bids can be solicited from pre-qualified suppliers. Agents now audit factories in real time with hand-held computers. Clients are able to monitor the details of every stage of an order, from the sign production run to shipping. One of the most important technologies has turned out to be videoconferencing. It allows buyers and manufacturers to examine the colour of a material or the stitching on a garment. Before, we werent able to send a 500MB imagewed post a DVD.Now we can stream it to show vendors in our offices. With real-time images we can make changes quicker, says Manuel Fernandez, Li Fungs chief technology officer. Data flowing through its network soared from 100 gigabytes a day only 18 months ago to 1 terabyte. The information system also allows Li & Fung to look across its operations to identify trends. In southern China, for instance, a shortage of workers and new legislation raised labour costs, so production moved north. We saw that before it actually happened, says Mr Fernandez.The company also got advance warning of the economic crisis, and later the recovery, from retailers orders before these trends became apparent. Investment analysts use country information provided by Li Fung to gain insights into macroeconomic patterns. Now that they are able to process information flows in real time, organisations are collecting more data than ever. One use for such information is to forecast when machines will break down. This hardly ever happens out of the blue there are usually warning signs such as noise, vibration or heat. Capturing such data enables firms to act before a breakdown.Similarly, the use of predictive analytics on the basis of large data sets may transform health care. Dr Carolyn McGregor of the University of Ontario, working with IB M, conducts research to spot potentially fatal infections in premature babies. The system monitors subtle changes in seven streams of real-time data, such as respiration, heart rate and blood pressure. The electrocardiogram alone generates 1,000 readings per second. This sweet of information is turned out by all medical equipment, but it used to be recorded on paper and examined perhaps once an hour.By feeding the data into a computer, Dr McGregor has been able to detect the plan of attack of an infection before obvious symptoms emerge. You cant see it with the naked eye, but a computer can, she says. Open sesame Two technology trends are helping to fuel these new uses of data cloud computing and open-source software. Cloud computingin which the internet is used as a platform to collect, store and process dataallows businesses to engage computing power as and when they need it, rather than having to buy expensive equipment.Amazon, Google and Microsoft are the most prominent firms to make their coarse computing infrastructure available to clients. As more corporate functions, such as human resources or sales, are managed over a network, companies can see patterns across the whole of the business and share their information more easily. A free programming language called R lets companies examine and present big data sets, and free software called Hadoop now allows ordinary PCs to analyse huge quantities of data that previously required a supercomputer. It does this by parcelling out the tasks to numerous computers at once.This saves time and money. For example, theNew York timea few years ago used cloud computing and Hadoop to qualify over 400,000 scanned images from its archives, from 1851 to 1922. By harnessing the power of hundreds of computers, it was able to do the job in 36 hours. Visa, a credit-card company, in a novel trial with Hadoop crunched two years of test records, or 73 billion transactions, amounting to 36 terabytes of data. The processing time fell from one month with traditional methods to a mere 13 minutes. It is a striking successor of Rittys incorruptible cashier for a data-driven age. rom the print edition Special report * Recommend 140 * * * Submit to reddit * inShare2 * View all comments (4) Related items TOPICChina * Recommended economics writing Link exchange * Trade Mexico rising * The Economist Digital highlights, November 24th 2012 TOPICNestle * Consumer goods in Africa A continent goes shopping * Schumpeter Pretty profitable parrots * Nestle buys Pfizer Nutrition Feeding little emperors TOPICIBM * Schumpeter Taking the long view * IBMs mainframes Old dog, new tricks * Phase-change memory Altered states TOPICRoyal Shakespeare Company William Shakespeare A digital reinvention * Culture Going for gold * Green architecture The retrofit revolution More related topics * Walmart Want more? 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