Shopping For Insight: Top Ways Retailers Are Scoring Big With Business Intelligence

By Scott Jennings, Director of Market Development, Retail & Services, QlikTech

Savvy consumers know they must shop around to get the best deals. In the same way, savvy retailers know that they must browse through data from multiple area of their business if they want find the most valuable insights. Yet, many retailers are still limiting their business intelligence strategy to standard canned reports that encapsulate historical performance but rarely lead to discoveries that improve the business.   

Here are the top ways retailers can use BI to uncover hidden insights and positively affect their business:

1. Capitalize on Executive Dashboards to better assess performance and make strategic decisions. The concept of executive dashboards is not new, but the adoption of self-service executive dashboards is still not widespread.  More commonly executives look at a dashboard style report and call an analyst to find out why numbers are trending a certain way.  Executive dashboards should allow executives to not only understand exceptions, but to answer the next business question without having to pick up the phone. 
2. Link corporate strategy with store level execution.  It is not enough to outfit stores with last week’s comparable sales figures. To make an impact, store performance dashboards need to operate in a near real time fashion and be available on a mobile platform. If a retailer is betting their future on fresh food, then field management must be able to discover the drivers behind the success or failure this initiative. That means information such as survey results on dirty equipment or poor product quality should be front and center for all key decision makers so they can take action as it happens. 
3. Track merchandising, pricing, inventory and operational performance data to achieve a tailored assortment.  Buyers are not technologists, but they know their business, and they need access to granular SKU/attribute performance data to make profitable decisions.  Self-service merchandise analytics dashboards can remove the complexity of assembling data, while allowing easy access to granular data.  This makes a buyer more efficient by letting the dashboard assemble the data and protects profits, through more intelligent buys.  A global upscale retailer deployed a merchandise analytics dashboard across the company and now spends 50% less time to yield up to 80% more detailed merchandising, pricing, inventory and operational performance information.  
4. Customer intelligence and omnichannel analytics go hand-in-hand.  The customer data that feeds an Omni-Channel Analytics dashboard allows a retailer to feel the pulse of their customers.  A best practices omni-channel analytics dashboard allows a retailer to tie together customer information from all shopping channels, providing a complete view of a customer regardless of shopping channel, and provide the basis for targeted offers through a number of different mediums (e-mail, traditional mail, or mobile device).  A great example is a UK-Based Apparel Retailer that analyzes campaign impact by date, gender, location, transaction value, and product category across 1.2 million shoppers. The result was 17,237 discount code downloads and a 50 percent increase in online sales.
5. Social Media Analytics Dashboards are no longer a pet project, but a must have for retailers.  Facebook and Twitter are now well established public companies and the information that can be gleamed from social media outlets can make or break a retailer. A best practices social media dashboard will provide a business user the ability to spot trends in social media that are relevant to their business while filtering out social media data points that are not. 
6. Enable a more nimble supply chain by bridging the gap between operations and finance leading to a more accurate forecast.  The demand plan permeates the supply chain, which requires comparison of the plan, statistical forecast, financial targets, and actuals. Business users need a mechanism to spot exceptions between the demand plan, statistical forecast, financial targets, and actuals to make adjustments to the assumptions which drive the planning and forecasting process. A global footwear company’s APAC division leverages demand planning dashboards to improve demand forecast accuracy comparisons tied to sales, sales efficiency, volume, and volume efficiency on a daily and weekly basis across retail and wholesale operations identifying cost-savings opportunities and streamlining the business as a whole.
7. Collaboration with suppliers to drive efficiencies.  Supplier performance dashboards allow retailers to identify their best suppliers and to jettison underperforming suppliers.  While suppliers benefit by gaining a better understanding of how specific categories are performing, they also establish a direct line of sight with respect to how they are performing against their Service Level Agreements. The opportunity for mutual benefit exists for suppliers and retailers however it requires the ability to pull information from many data sources both inside and outside the corporate firewall in a collaborative fashion. 
8. Ensure effective allocation of IT resources, monitor inventory, evaluate existing technology investments and track program budgets. IT resources are a scarce resource in most retailers, so they must deploy resources judiciously. Therefore, they need a good vehicle for understanding which projects are tracking against the project plan, and what the overall level of Return on Investment the business is receiving from their technology projects. 

With the proliferation of shopping channels, rapid adoption of mobile devices, M&A activity, and increased competition through the blurring of lines across traditional retail segments, 2014 will be a year of change.  Retailers can safely ride the wave of change by incorporating a flexible business intelligence and data discovery strategy which allows them to get ahead of demand without investing in high risk multi-year analytics projects.  In the end, flexible and fast BI in a sea of change will help determine the winners and losers in the retail industry.  Retailers take a cue from their customers when it comes to BI solutions, and become savvy shoppers when shopping for insight.

Scott Jennings the Director of Market Development, Retail & Services at QlikTech, is a retail BI veteran with more than 14 years in the industry. During his time with QlikTech and other BI industry leaders Scott has had the opportunity to work closely with customer and analysts, keeping his finger on the pulse of new industry trends and emerging technologies that are paving the way for the future of retail BI.