Sales and Marketing Analysis Most commercial companies need to do analysis of this type, although it is possible to define three sectors where large volumes of data are analysed: Consumer goods companies often have many products and outlets which means that there are lots of dimensions to analyse. Both the products manufactured and the outlets for those products can have high rates of change. Normally, data has to analysed on a monthly and weekly basis, and sometimes daily. In this case there will be a high number of business rules to take into account and so the analysis carried out will quite sophisticated. Retailers have an enormous amount of information which they obtain from EPOS systems and client fidelity cards. They can have more than 100,000 product lines on sale at any one time, and many branches. The most detailed level of analysis here will be sales per 15 minute period. The analysis carried out is simple but it is applied to large volumes of data. Financial services companies such as banks or insurance companies use BI applications to analyse risk, sometimes on an idividual client level. The can be a high number of dimensions depending on the number of attributes which are taken into account, but normally with few data levels (flat hierarchy). The advantages of a good sales and marketing analysis system are: - Business results are more predictable and easier to manipulate - Opportunities are easier to spot - Increased salesforce productivity