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Question: Discuss About The Bi Capabilities And Decision Environments? Answer: Introduction: Business intelligence is the strategy or the technology used for the analysis of the data involving the informations of a business. Business intelligence (Chen, Chiang and Storey, 2012) helps in predicting the previous, current and future views of the operations performed in a business. The common operations that are involved in a business intelligence are reporting, processing of the analytics online, mining of the data, process mining, processing of the complex events, management of the business performances, benchmarking, mining of the text predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics (Laursen and Thorlund, 2016). Knowledge management refers to the process which involves the sharing, creating and use and management of the knowledge and the information of a certain organisation. Knowledge management (Hislop, 2013) uses a number of approaches for achieving the objectives of an organisation by the best use of the knowledge. This report is going to discuss, analyse and evaluate the requirements of the organisation for determining the effectiveness of business intelligence and knowledge management by considering the case study of the SunPower. Business strategies adopted by SunPower: SunPower adopted a position of as one of the efficient solar cell producer. The CEO Tom Werner was aware of the recent forecast about the huge growth of solar power in the future and he was also aware of the fact that he would asked few tough questions. He was facing a dilemma about how long will the advantage of the solar power will last or how much will be the growth of the solar industry. Solar power is very much eco-friendly this is the main reason for which make it one of the most important driver of the world renewed interest. Earth receives much more energy from the sun than the energy consumed by the humans in the entire year. The solar cells convert the solar energy into electrical energy and the performance of the solar energy is measured in terms of the conversion energy. The main aim of SunPower was to commercialise the solar technology. The basic way of doing so was lowering the costs of the technology and increase the production. The company started after the request fr om the Honda automobiles. Honda requested SunPower to make a solar powered racing car and the company was able to do that after that NASA contacted SunPower. That time the company faced a dilemma weather to work in a single shift or a double shift and there was no solution regarding the issues. When one friend of the founder of SunPower T.J Rodgers, founder of Cypress heard about the issue he decided to use some of the talents of his company with that of the SunPower. After three weeks the company become fully operational working 24 hours. Honda won the race across Australia. NASA approached SunPower so as to produce a solar powered airplane. This production of the company was also successful and the airplane named Helios created a record of highest sustained level flight. After this the company increased its production and the various business strategies adopted by the company are listed below. Business intelligence: Business intelligence or BI helps to handle the large amount of data that are sometimes structured or sometimes unstructured and also helps in identifying and developing business strategy sometimes or create a new business strategy for the opportunities in a business.BI also aims at interpretation of the big data easily (Kimball et al.,2015). New opportunities and the implementation of the new business strategies are identified and this are based on the insights that helps in providing the business with an advantage and a stability in the market full of competition. SunPower had a stable and a long-term business intelligence partner to help them handle the new projects and the running projects. They sought the application of the enterprise which feed the data to the single BI platform. This helped them handle the data and the complexities of the system which were large in amount. Along with other vendors the organisation also invited AppsTek for the purpose of creating a partnership and gain support for the critical missions in the BI applications (Isik, Jones and Sidorova, 2013). The main aim of SunPower was to commercialise the solar technology. When SunPower was making solar cells for the Hondas solar powered racing car it was long away from the day when it reached to one of the leading solar power providing companies. During its start the company had no expectations about having support from the public or private sectors but along with the growth it gained a lot of support from the different sectors. SunPower also aimed at lowering the costs of the installation process of the products. The efficiency of the cells was much higher thereby helping the company to gain an advantage in the system of installation segment. Business intelligence or BI is process that is driven by the technology and is used for the purpose of analysing the data and taking business decisions by the other corporate end users (Chen, Chiang and Storey, 2012). BI consist of a number of tools and applications and methods that makes the organisation capable of collecting data from the internal systems of the organisation along with the external sources. This in terms helps in the preparation of process for analysing and for the development and running purpose of any kind of quarries that are against the data which later helps in the creating of the reports, dashboards and data visualisations so as to make the results available to the corporate decision makers and the operational workers. The main benefit of BI is that it helps in the acceleration an improvement of the decision making along with the increase in the efficiency of the operations, for the driving of new revenues and helps in gaining of an advantage over the competi tors present in the market (Anandarajan, Anandarajan and Srinivasan, 2012). As in case of SunPower there were many business rivals like the Sharp Solar, Q-Cells, REC Group and many others so there was an essential need for the company to apply various techniques for the better marketing and increased production of the products. They aimed at lowering the costs so as to take a good place in the market. They made the cost almost reduce to half of the selling price of a totally installed system. Various strategies adopted by the company also helped the company earn much more benefits than the estimated profits. Knowledge management: Knowledge management or KM mainly includes a disciplinary course on the fields of the business administration, information systems and the management of the library and the information science (Liebowitz and Frank, 2016). KM mainly aims at the objectives of the organisations that includes the improved performance, advantage in the field of competition, new innovations, sharing of the lessons that are learned, and the continuous improvement of the organisation. This overlaps with the organisational learning. The process development of SunPower was mainly done at the Philippines so that the company could gain an advantage about the technical capabilities and also to reduce the cost. The companies process was similar to the typical production process and this benefited the company a lot from the process of manufacturing (Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2014). As the efficiency of the cells produced by the company SunPower were high thereby helping it to gain a lot of advantage. The mor e efficiency of the cells helped in providing a much more amount of power to the small amount of space. Thereby a house having a small roof space had the capability of providing more power. Less space and less modules helped in lowering the installation cost and the willingness of the SunPowers customers and installers to pay a higher price for the panels. The two main aspects of knowledge management are the information management and people management. Many people are aware and familiar with the word information management. Information management is mainly associated with the management of the knowledge related with the identification and handling of the objects of the information system. This practice of the information management was developed and was accepted by the higher officials when they realised that information is one of the most important cooperate resource for the company to face the competitiveness. This initially lead to the development of the concepts of information analysis and information planning. This development of the concepts provided a greater tool for the users (Hamidi et al., 2016). The second aspect is the people management which basically includes the management of the knowledges that are inside the heads of peoples. It mainly involves the managing of the knowledge which mainly involves a set of skills that are dynamic and to know the capabilities related to the knowledge (Donate and de Pablo, 2015). Consideration needs to be done about the social and cultural values along with the attitudes and aspirations and the likes and the dislikes of the people so as to manage the people effectively who own the desired tactic knowledge. this is a process which can be adopted so as to create new knowledges which cannot be accomplished by the use of only information management. The aspects of the KM mainly involve two immediate concerns they are: increased productivity of the organisational knowledge and the production of benefits that are much more than the benefits that were predicted. KM helps in adopting of business strategies that helps in providing excellent opportunities for the organisations development. It means KM can open doors for creating new business strategies and helps in establishing a better relation with the customers and the suppliers. KM opens new business opportunities by the optimal use of knowledges. in case of SunPower the business strategy of providing solar panels not only helped in development of the company but also helped it to reach a good place in the market. Knowledge based system: Knowledge based system or the KBS is a computer program that uses the knowledge as a base for the solving of the problems that are complex. It is board term and is used for the referring of the different kinds of systems (Giboney et al., 2015). There are three types of sub systems in a KBS and they are: A knowledge base A user interface An inference engine KBS is basically a system which is based upon certain rules. With the increase in the complexities of the KBS the techniques are also becoming sophisticated which are used for representing of the knowledge base. Decision support system: Decision support system or the DSS is an information system that helps in making decision regarding the various activities of n organisation or information system that supports the business. DSS helps in serving the management of an organisation, operation of an organisation and the planning levels of an organisation (Demirkan and Delen, 2013). DSS helps in managing the making of the decisions regarding the problems that are changing rapidly and that are not specified in advance. DSS mainly aims at solving the problems that are faced by the upper level managers. It aims at combining the use of the models or the analytic techniques with the old data access and retrieval functions so as to solve the problems. DSS mainly puts emphasis on the flexibility and the adaptability so as to accommodate with the changes in the environment and the approaches made by the user for the purpose of making decisions (Bonczek, Holsapple, and Whinston, 2014). The company SunPower was not confident and wa s unsure about the production of the solar powered racing car. The decision of producing solar cells for Hondas racing car was greatly supported by the founder of Cypress and he decided to form a collaboration with SunPower. But the later decision of the company SunPower to produce solar cells soon integrated to the productions of the modules which were later followed by the manufacturing of the wafers. The first success by producing the solar powered racing car and solar powered airplane greatly boosted up the companies production. The company also decided to establish partnership with the Cypress in 2001 which helped in the production of solar cells for commercial purposes in the year of 2004 and 2005. Initially the company went public in the NASDAQ stock exchange. This decision helped the company to gain huge amount of benefits firstly $6million in the year of 2004, then $78.8 million in the year of 2005 and finally it raised to more than $220million in the year of 2006 which was much greater that the estimated profit. Group support system: Group support system or the GSS consist of a set of techniques softwares and technology that are mainly designed for the purpose of focusing and enhancing the communications, deliberations and the decision makings of a certain group. With the growth in the complexities of the organization because of the growth of the organisation leads to the necessity of the company to operate more efficiently and effectively. These characteristics helps the organisation to reduce its cost, professional projection and the reputation (Thompson and Carter, 2013). Which in term fosters the teamwork of the employees. The SunPower almost reduced the cost to half to that of an installed system. By reducing the cost of the system it gained the attention of the customers and also made many private and public sectors to invest in the projects of the company. It was the joint venture of the peoples of the company to make its position in such a place in the competitive market. By working 24 hours the company w as successful in the production of the Honda solar powered racing car. This was a group work of the company Cypress and SunPower. Cypress greatly helped the company and supported it when the company was facing a state of dilemma. Conclusion: This report helps to conclude that the various strategies that has been adopted by the company SunPower for the development. There are various ways in which the company earned a lot of profits by the business of solar panels. The company made decisions that that initially made it advance in the competitive market. 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