Wholesale/Retail
In the highly competitive wholesale/retail sector of the petroleum industry, each company tries to leverage its understanding of its customers and its ability to optimize inventory deliveries to attain the highest possible margin on end products. Wholesale/retail requires the collection and analysis of vast quantities of data on customer behavior and process monitoring and optimization.
SAIC has outstanding experience in analyzing large volumes of data and monitoring distributed processes to help its customers gain a wealth of business intelligence. SAIC expertise also helps wholesale/retail customers increase revenues and cost-savings with electronic commerce and boost shipment management efficiency.
Wholesale/Retail Solutions
Data Mining
Data mining looks for subtle relationships hidden within enormous datasets and extracts information from many sources so that unknown patterns and trends become quickly apparent. It typically is used in the retail and financial worlds, where large transactional databases are continuously mined for previously unrecognized business intelligence. It can offer the wholesale/retail sector a strong competitive advantage.
SAIC has led numerous projects involving data warehousing and data mining for commercial customers.
Electronic Commerce
Enormous opportunities for cost-savings and increased revenues in wholesale/retail exist through online sales of products and services. SAIC helps customers take advantage of electronic commerce.
SAIC's Internet consulting services and software products can help wholesale/retail customers define and deploy electronic strategies. Our Internet-related offerings include:
- Business case development to determine if and how the World Wide Web can advance your business goals
- Service design and engineering to create the content elements of your online services and requirements for any supporting software
- Usage-sensitive billing capabilities, so that you can collect, store, analyze, and generate billing-related data to support your online operations
- Security and fraud prevention
- Hands-on training to help your employees launch and manage online services Network and systems integration to interconnect your network with the Web
- Prototyping and field testing of your Web services
- Marketing and sales support enabling you to create and distribute interactive advertisements on the Web to targeted customer groups
- Operations implementation and customer response measurement
Shipment Management System
Wholesale/retail depends on efficient shipment management. SAIC is developing a shipment management system (SMS), designing software, database structures, and procedures to support mission-critical freight operations that minimize the dependency on legacy systems.
For Conrail, specific SMS functions include managing functions required to track the location of trains and cars, schedule and to book trains, process alerts, process invoices, and maintain the SMS databases. To meet the end users' needs, SAIC's approach includes a high degree of involvement of the railroad's end-users in the design. The design also is being developed to be robust and expandable so it can meet future requirements.
