THE FOUNDATION OF INFORMATION

More than data, the end-users want need to take benefits of information and knowledge held by an information management system.

“From data to information to knowledge”

In order to differentiate these notions, let's take the following example:

• 01001101 + 01001000 + 01001101 => DATA
• char(77) + char(72) + char(77) => Information?
• MIM – three letters => Information?
• MIM – Magic In Modeling => Information?
• MIM – Margin Increase Maximization => Information?
• MIM – Master Information Management => Information
• Master Information Management – The single source of information shared all across businesses => Knowledge

Data are the early beginning of the chain. They are source for information but are meaningless if one is not able to understand it in a given context.

The MIM solution embeds a unique data model, designed for retail industry and holding all its specificities. Moreover, with 25 years of success deliveries for various retailers, valoores in'Retail MIM is now designed for different activity domains (General Merchandise, Grocery, Pharmacy (Rx items), DIY (Transformed items), Apparel ( colors & size management )…) and different businesses (Purchase, Sales, Offer Management, Operations, Finance…)

BUSINESS BENEFITS

The implementation of a MIM solution at the heart of the Information Systems ensures, with same philosophy than MDM solutions:

• Consistency of information
• Uniqueness of information
• Up-to-date information
• Information shared by all tier solutions

In addition, the MIM includes two additional layers related to movement information and simulation information. This approach combines MDM and Data Warehouse needs into a central solution, ensuring the consistency between Referential information, historical results and forecast simulation.

“The single view of end-user puts data themselves at the heart of the business interest,
since the single view of the data focuses on requirements to manage them”

As a result, and thanks to the Retail Business Suite Services, changes at any level of the business processes are automatically reflected to the other levels to ensure a global consistency of strategy and processes execution.

For example, a change in promotional items selection due to late unavailability of a supplier is directly taken into consideration into centralized forecast simulation and therefore transmitted to the operations to review the store allocation strategy accordingly.

KEY FEATURES

The MIM main features are:

• Information integrity management
  The MIM solution holds a single version of the information shared by all businesses. It ensures that any user access same information, kept up-to-date with the right statuses, avoiding duplicate and different levels of knowledge depending on maturity of business solutions.
• Model available for all business services
  The MIM solution at its data model is composed of several layers and modules. Depending of the clients needs, its implementation is flexible, holding referential information and extensions to movement and forecast simulations.
  In addition, depending on the activity of the retailer, MIM includes extensions to map the precise need of retailers (GM, DIY, Apparel…)
• Extension to historical and forecast information management
  The MIM solution can be viewed as the generalized MDM solution, including evolving information (sales, stocks, inventory…) to centralize knowledge of the business at a single place.
  With such approach, valoores in'Retail ensures a full consistency of information, available for all businesses.

Whatever the retailer implementation, MIM as the basis of the solution, will guarantee information integrity and allow fast extensions to additional businesses.