Aramex is a well-recognized global brand for individual customers and business customers alike. It provides logistics and transport services including international and domestic express delivery, freight, warehousing and supply logistics, technology solutions for managing the supply chain, and even online shopping services.

With its popular 'Shop and Ship' (SnS) service, Aramex targets individual consumers by opening up new shopping opportunities via the web. Many consumers want to shop at stores internationally, using websites to access goods and fashions. But they often end up paying enormous international shipping costs or finding out that the store does not ship items internationally at all. SnS addresses this problem. It charges a single lifetime membership fee (this is charged at US$45 at the time of writing), to provide customers with official 'physical' postal addresses in the U.S., U.K. and China. They can then purchase goods at local prices without paying international fees or shipping, and those items will be sent to their postal address. Aramex picks up and ships the item at its standard shipment rates. Thus, customers can access all kinds of items including clothes, toys, appliances, homeware, auto parts, magazine subscriptions, and a lot more which would otherwise be unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

Aramex has developed a dedicated website for SnS: www.shopandship.com. SnS has offices in over 30 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, U.A.E., Jordan and Egypt. It has proved a successful recipe, growing rapidly since the service first launched in 2000. Aramex is keen to develop the service, as is evident from its active pursuit of partnerships that will help it to grow further.

For any company like Aramex, customer data have a very high potential value indeed. 'Big Data' are datasets that grow so large that they become difficult to work with and to make sense of with traditional database management tools. Big data is characterized by the so-called 3 Vs. That is, its volume is large, its variety is high, and its velocity is recognized. Having only one of these attributes, e.g., very large data volume, does not qualify for big data. Instead, variety and/or velocity must accompany the large volume.

Through SnS, Aramex gathers vast quantities of customer data, including how much each customer spends, items they purchase, shops they buy from, countries they buy most from, and much more. The possibility of turning these data into information to build customer profiles and model customer buying behavior would be extremely valuable to Aramex. This would enable the company to segment and target SnS customers more effectively, developing services and promotions to appeal to particular customer groups based on their profiles, ultimately serving those customers more effectively and thereby earning higher revenue.

So, Aramex's partnership with nPario, announced in May 2011, comes as no surprise. A software development company with operations in the Middle East and North America, focused on data analytics soft- ware, nPario develops systems which help companies make sense of their data. Its approach is to develop software which taps into the data produced by consumers when they use the internet. These data enable companies to build information about customers, to understand their internet trends and their 'intent.' Companies can then use this information in a targeted way to increase revenue, by developing marketing insights and strategies to appeal to customer segments, win their business, and better service the needs of customers. It can also be used to measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns, and to tweak tactics mid-campaign to improve results.

Aramex decided to implement nPario's 'Big Data' suite of software, including the nPario Insights and Segment Explorer tools so it could make better use of the data already being generated by SnS custom- ers. Aramex hopes to use this to enhance the service offered to SnS customers, as well as being able to target specific customer segments with appropriate offers.

NPario's software can handle large quantities of customer data while still keeping the granular detail required to build a meaningful profile of individual customers. Sales and usage data are gathered over time, so the more data available the deeper and more accurate the insights will be. The profile of an SnS account holder will be more accurate if it is based on information about their purchases over a long-time period, rather than just looking at one or two purchasesit will reveal a fuller picture of their preferences and buying habits, and unusual activity (such as a purchase only made very rarely) will be de-emphasized. For example, if a female account holder uses the site mainly to buy books and DVDs, but once bought an electrical appliance, the data could be misleading if they happened to include just two purchases and one of those was the electrical appliance. Data built up over a two-year period on this female customer would reveal her primary behavior and intent more accurately, emphasizing her preference for using the website to buy books and DVDs rather than appliances.

Using nPario's Insights and Segment Explorer, Aramex will now be enabled to: Identify detailed customer segment groups, based on behavioral characteristics and demographics. Develop marketing campaigns, and fine-tune those campaigns based on real-time responses of consumers. Increase 'conversion rates'i.e., the number of potential sales which are turned into actual sales by predicting consumer intent and responding with the most relevant offers and promotions. Improve the efficiency of business operations including fulfillment, forecasting, seasonal management, etc. by more accurately under- standing consumer behavior.

Aramex is by no means alone in identifying the potential value of Big Data. Npario offers services to companies across four key sectors: inter- net and new media, telecom and wireless, banking and finance, and retail. NPario is a young company, established in 2010 by former Yahoo and SAS executives, and its quick success is a sign of companies starting to recognize how much value they can gain from their customer data. NPario recently announced a strategic partnership with WPP, a world-leading company in advertising and marketing services, to develop technology solutions aimed at helping marketers and advertisers gain quick access to customer insights from a variety of sources, and use the data to improve targeting and results.

Question

1. Based on the organization components/definition discussion in the class, identify in the case the features discussed (such as processes, culture...)