Sherif Kottapurath, CEO, Posibolt
Retail analytics has evolved from the days of simple reporting and analysis to a point where it can be harnessed to drive innovation and transform traditional business models. Retail analytics is all about using data to uncover insights for better decision making and improving business performance.
In the past, if a company wanted to understand how customers were behaving and what they were buying, it was faced with a number of challenges: Where do we start? What questions should we be asking? How can we ensure that we are getting the right answers? Collecting, storing and analyzing data is the easy part — it’s what technology has made possible. But turning data into insights is hard. In fact, more than 85 percent of big data projects fail due to poor planning and inadequate skills. That’s why so many companies today are turning to data-driven decision making. The retail market is a highly competitive environment with return on investment and margins always under pressure. Retailers are looking for new ways to grow, reduce costs and add a human touch in their interactions with customers. The retail industry is constantly changing, so retailers must be ready to change along with it. If you are a retailer or part of the retail chain, you need to keep the customer in focus at all times. You must strive to provide an outstanding experience through your products and services.
With the recent phenomena of applying emerging technologies to solve business problems, IT in general is getting its due respect finally and Industry segments like Retail is experiencing huge transformation, paradigm shift and being seen as a torchbearer in using IT to drive disruptive change.
The success of some of the retail giants has made them household names not just in the west but in developing economies like India. The key to success of these well-known online retail giants is their capability to understand the customer behavior and provide a more personalized and convenient shopping experience while optimizing their fulfillment and delivery processes offering products and services to the time starved and demanding mobile customer of today. This very act of making business sense and actionable insights out of the knowledge of customer demographics, preferences, shopping history and other heuristics is an example of how Analytics can transform your business.
There are several excellent success stories of retail analytics that are relevant to a variety of companies and are actually driving successful business models today.
As an example one of the biggest benefits the field delivers is in optimizing the inventory, procurement and delivery processes. Thanks to predictive tools, businesses can use historical data of transactions and trend analysis to determine which products they should order, and in what quantities instead of relying on hunches or simplistic forecasts based on past orders.
It also helps in identifying at store level, what products need to be stocked, need to be displayed prominently etc.
Posibolt a complete retail analytics software
Posibolt solutions understands this requirement well and offers a wide variety of Analytical Dashboards that are based on the past performance and trend analysis data of individual businesses and their various segments.
The following are some examples of our Dashboards with year wise comparisons
- Organization / Branch wise Overall Performance Analysis
- Organization / Branch wise Quarterly/ Monthly Performance Analysis
- Organization / Branch and Segment wise Analysis
Detailed reports on stockout, overstocking etc. combined with fast and slow moving item reports allow the business leaders to quickly understand the changes that need to be made – what to order more, what to order later, what items to promote or clear out with discounts, …
These have helped our customers to reduce the cost overheads and to increase sales; in addition to easing the process of opening new store locations and thus improving their top and bottom lines.