Content about business intelligence

Real estate solution-providers equip retailers to make strategic decisions

Any economic recovery begs a number of questions for a retailer: When can I grow again? Where should I go? What does my customer want and need now? How big can my stores — and my business — be? Even though we are on the other side of the deepest recession in decades, it is still critical that retailers correctly answer these questions. We're long past the days when a chain could rely on gut instinct about a store location.

By Greg Munves, greg@1010data.com

If you’re like many mid-level or tier one retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, you’ve probably made a significant investment in Big Data, capturing and analyzing customer buying patterns across your business. You may not realize, however, that this huge IT investment can actually be a profit center, if you sell your data back upstream to your suppliers.
 

Worthington, Ohio -- Three high-profile big-box retailers received high marks for their mobile experiences, according to a survey by Prosper Insights & Analytics. In fact, among mobile users, 28.9% have used their mobile devices to shop at Walmart, 27.7% at Target, and 22% at Best Buy.

New York -- From solutions having to do with enterprise business intelligence to mobility, there were a host of retail technology deployments announced at the National Retail Federation’s 102nd Annual Convention & Expo. Here is a quick recap of some key applications:

Atlanta -- Retail analytics firm QuantiSense announced Monday that Hibbett Sports has selected the QuantiSense Decision Orchestration Platform for its enterprise business intelligence solution.

Hibbett Sports needed a single foundation for enterprise business intelligence that could satisfy current merchandising and store operations requirements and expand to other departments over time.
 

Tysons Corner, Va. -- MicroStrategy Inc. announced that West-coast based specialty retailer Tilly's has launched a state-of-the-art mobile commerce app powered by MicroStrategy's Alert Mobile Commerce Platform.

The strategic role that IT plays in retail is evident as retailers across the board continue to up their technology investments. And with retail innovation being driven largely by tech-related advances in customer analytics, mobile and social commerce, and cross-channel strategies, IT spending is expected to remain a top priority.

But with increased investment comes the risk of overspending, warned NPI, a spend-management consulting firm that works with large retailers to maximize IT and telecom spending.

San Antonio -- The grocery industry, for the most part, lags in using online shopper insights for shopper and competitive advantage, according to a study developed in partnership with BeaconUnited, a national grocery broker, and ArchPoint Consulting, and powered by business intelligence firm Black Pearl Intelligence. Grocery-related social media conversations are now estimated at 10 million annually, yet many grocers are still slow to respond, the study found.

Eager to make more effective business decisions, many retailers are reevaluating their business intelligence strategies. With a renewed focus on breaking down enterprise-wide silos, retailers are making a move to the next generation of BI, which includes giving line and store managers access to predictive analytics tools and multifunctional views of data.

Making better business decisions requires retailers to break down silos between company divisions, and deliver scalable predictive tools that allow managers enterprise-wide to sift through mission-critical information.

Chain Store Age talked with Andrea Morgan-Vandome, VP retail strategy and solution marketing, Oracle Retail, about the importance of business intelligence (BI).

What is the biggest change today related to retail analytics and BI? 

Tokyo -- Analytic data solution-provider Teradata said Monday that Takashimaya Co. has completed deployment of a Teradata data warehousing environment to serve as the primary data analytics system for centrally housing and managing its product and customer information.

Takashimaya is one of the world's largest chains of department stores, and is the nucleus of the Takashimaya Group worldwide.

By Sean Jackson, Sean.Jackson@actian.com

In recent weeks, there have been some well-publicised examples of retail giants whose financial performance has been severely impacted by breakdowns in the supply chain. As salt in the wound to these behemoths of retail, there are just as many examples of organizations that have exceeded market expectations due to an ability to behave nimbly and respond quickly to changes in consumer demand.