Business Intelligence in the Retail Environment– Challenges, Solutions & Impacts

Introduction

Today’s retail environment is exposed to many different challenges from all angles in the industry. Short term trends, media impact, competitor campaigns and even the weather can have unforeseen impacts. Pomerol provides the ability to model these types of impacts across both historical and forward-looking data sets to better understand risk and opportunity in your market.

Understanding and Optimising Retail Geographies

• Planning out sales territories with front line reps, or justifying territory boundaries to retail partners, creates a range of challenges, often due to a lack of information to support decision making.
• Use Qlik and GeoAnalytics to visualise your retail geography. Overlay analytics to show under–supported areas or territory overlap.
• Integrate big data feeds such as population and demographics to help support commitment to a retail location.
• Plot key competitors to better understand the retail environment you’re competing in.

Store Keeping Unit (SKUs) Rationalisation

• As business expands a portfolio of SKUs can begin to get away on you. Low or negative margin lines become lost in the mix and begin to erode net margin.
• Leverage Qlik’s associative data model to start at any point in your product hierarchy and identify the true drivers of both positive and negative to margin.
• Identify under-performing SKUs, build performance trending to help explain cyclical and seasonal dependencies, and stay one step ahead of maintaining a healthy and efficient product portfolio.

Loyalty Program Monitoring and Management

• Loyalty programmes can have varied success depending on the ability to customise the way different customer are rewarded.
• Build custom categorisations to group your customers by purchase history, demographics, geographies and personality.
• Drive a tailored approach to rewarding loyalty and use analytics to capture and analyse the results.

Mobile Analytics and Data Capture in the Field

• The pace at which meaningful analytics can be produced is offered hampered by the use of multiple disparate systems.
• Use Pomerol’s data writeback extensions to enable data entry directly into your analytics platform.
• Capture customer feedback, enter meeting notes, adjust discounts and targets, and see the impact on the business in real time.