Traditionally, the retail industry has lagged behind other industries in adopting new technologies, and this holds true in its acceptance of BI technology.
Some industries, such as financial services, have become very sophisticated in using BI software for financial reporting and consolidation, customer intelligence, regulatory compliance, and risk management. However, retailers are quickly catching up and beginning to recognize the many areas of BI that can be applied specifically to their businesses.
The competitive game is changing for retail. As the industry continues to consolidate, retailers have begun to realize that using technology to better understand customer buying behavior, to drive sales and profitability, and to reduce operational costs is a necessity for long-term survival.
Retailers are now paying significant attention to BI software, specifically in the areas of merchandise intelligence (including merchandise planning, assortment, size, space, price, promotion, and markdown optimization), customer intelligence (including marketing automation, marketing optimization, and market basket analysis), operational intelligence (including IT portfolio management, labor optimization, and real estate site selection), and competitive intelligence. There are many factors that have led retailers to adopt BI software: increased competition, the need to squeeze more profitability out of less space, prevalent credit card usage, the Internet’s role as an alternative sales channel, the popularity of loyalty cards, and soon, RFID (radio frequency identification). These milestones have created a wealth of data that retailers are now beginning to appreciate and use.
Within individual companies, we view the history of BI in retail through a method that we devised to describe the status of any company’s evolution toward becoming an intelligent enterprise. We believe that organizations pass through five fundamental stages as they advance in their use of BI as a competitive differentiator:
Armed with information and business process knowledge, organizations approaching the innovate level will introduce truly innovative products and services that reflect their unique understanding of the market, their internal strengths and weaknesses, and an unfailing flow of ideas from continuously engaged employees.
We are finding that most large retailers have reached or are approaching the integrate stage, with many making great strides toward the optimize and innovate levels. There is an enormous opportunity for the evolution to continue — within every retail organization.
The Presence of BI in the Retail IT Infrastructure
In the typical retail IT infrastructure, there are two fundamental categories of systems: transactional/operational systems, such as POS and purchase order management systems; and analytic/BI systems.
Operational and transactional systems such as merchandise management, ERP (enterprise resource planning), and POS, are very good at what they do — organizing huge amounts of operational data and transactions. These systems can tell retailers what has happened in their business and what their customers have done — last week, last month, and last year.
It’s critical, however, for retailers to understand what will happen: what the demand will be for a select assortment of merchandise, what impact an incremental price change will have on demand, which floor plan will sell more designer shoes, which customers will respond to a direct mail or catalog offer.
Real value comes from systems that go beyond the limitations of operational software alone, systems that can take operational data and create enterprise intelligence and predictive insights.
These BI systems must combine data management (consolidating, organizing, and cleansing huge amounts of disparate data from varying systems and platforms) with predictive analytics (data mining, forecasting, optimization). When they do, retailers can make sense of customer, product, supplier, and operational data and draw insights that will help them run their businesses better and more profitably.
Leading retailers around the globe — like Wal-Mart, Foot Locker, Staples, Williams-Sonoma, and Amazon.com and many others — have begun using BI and analytics to make an array of strategic decisions. These include where to place retail outlets, how many of each size or color of an item to put in each store, and when and how much to discount. The effects of these decisions can save or generate millions of dollars for retailers.
The Strength of the Market for BI in Retail Today
The market is very strong and getting stronger. While it is difficult to find a comprehensive suite of retail-specific BI offerings that spans the spectrum from competitive intelligence to merchandise planning and optimization (product, price, promotion, and placement) based on customer insight, to knowing how to maximize the ROI on the next marketing campaign, to understanding where to build the next store, to reducing supply chain costs. Retailers are telling us over and over that they are seeking a single, stable, reliable, and proven provider of superior BI solutions. They are implementing projects that span multiple years and will deliver value for years to come.
The Retailers that are Realizing the Most Benefits from BI
We find that the retailers that are realizing the most significant returns on their investments are those that take a purposeful, pragmatic approach to establishing an intelligence platform upon which to base all other BI solutions. A single, reliable demand forecast, for instance, can also be used in merchandising, marketing, logistics, store operations, call center staffing, etc., for operational benefit. BI that remains segmented by functional area can provide some value, but retailers can realize a much larger return by building the foundation upon which the rest of the house will stand. This is true of both top-tier and midmarket retailers, regardless of segment.
Specific Areas in Which Retailers can Benefit Most Include:
The Integrated Solution
It is important to note that a good BI solution will be able to integrate with any other system or platform. That said different BI solutions need to interface with different operational systems for different purposes.
A solution seeking to use customer behavioral data to make better merchandising or marketing decisions needs to interface with sales transaction systems, loyalty systems, in-house credit systems, coupon redemption systems, catalog and Internet customer data systems, and so forth. A system that recommends optimized price changes should interface with the price management system, the item master, the system that generates labels, etc.
There must be a closed-loop interface between the operational systems that retailers rely upon to conduct day-to-day business and the BI systems that help them conduct that business more efficiently and profitably.
The Future of BI in Retail
BI will be defined by the retailers that have figured out how to maximize customer satisfaction and profitability with the right combination of quality products, friendly and efficient service, unique value, a differentiated shopping experience, and a business model that truly serves its community — locally and globally. How will this be accomplished? It starts with understanding the customer and then linking that insight into every decision that is made, from merchandising to marketing to distribution to store operations to finance, so that retailers can predict how to best serve their customers’ ever-changing needs and desires.
Our vision for the future of retail BI provides for that very scenario, through our intelligence platform and our solutions for customer, merchandise, operations, and performance intelligence that are combined in a suite designed to equip retailers to become truly innovative.
A solution seeking to use customer behavioral data to make better merchandising or marketing decisions needs to interface with sales transaction systems, loyalty systems, in-house credit systems, coupon redemption systems, catalog and Internet customer data systems, and so forth. A system that recommends optimized price changes should interface with the price management system, the item master, the system that generates labels, etc.
I have had a dynamic 11-year career reflecting pioneering experience and record-breaking performance in the IT and MIS industries. I am currently the Director of Microsoft Solutions for OnX Enterprise Solutions a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
