Data needs to be like electricity that will power the innovation engine of the organization.
If the future of retail is focused on data, then the retailers who will be successful will be those that use the data effectively. The data collected needs to be available to all parts of the organization seamlessly. It needs to be available everywhere and to everyone in your business. Data needs to be like electricity that will power the innovation engine of the organization.
In our previous blog entries, we discussed the challenges with gathering unique data on the customer and other in-store metrics. We identified ways to obtain this data with the use of solutions from our partners, TruRating and FastSensor. However, the challenge is not just with obtaining these unique datasets. Many retailers also struggle to effectively manage and disseminate their existing data throughout the organization.
Most retailers still require IT resources to generate standard reporting and struggle to provide dynamic queries to support analysis by end users. In these retailers, the data is either trapped in silos or difficult to access which limits the effectiveness and ability to use it within the business. This situation creates an extensive bottleneck and significantly limits innovation.
However, there is a better way.
Imagine if you could build a single depository, a data warehouse, for all of the data within your organization including key datasets from product, inventory, financial, sales and customer. You could update the data warehouse real-time from all of the various business systems that generate the data. The data warehouse would reside in the cloud and be optimized to manage this data. It would be the single version of the truth for all of the data throughout the organization.
The consolidation of this data into a single depository provides some exciting opportunities to generate insights and awareness for the business. You could create dashboards that give your business real-time access to key performance indicators with the ability to drill down into the lowest level of data with a few clicks of the mouse. These dashboards, tools and reports can be shared throughout the organization easily and be accessible from the user’s desktop or mobile device anytime, anywhere.
Now imagine that everyone within your organization could get access to the data that resides in the data warehouse in order to use it for their specific area and role within the business. They could access the data warehouse for ad hoc reporting and analysis using simple tools that they use every day such as spreadsheets on their desktops. Using tools such as Excel to access the data makes it very intuitive for your end users. The learning curve is practically non-existent and it becomes a significant time-saver for the organization.
We believe that there are two components to an effective data strategy for all retailers. First, is to gather and collect the most relevant information possible and second is to effectively manage and disseminate the data to every part of the business that requires it to do their job. And as we have concluded, in the retailer of the future, every part of the organization will rely on data to be successful.
Accuvia Software Group has partnered with Infodepth to create a business intelligence (BI) solution called VIA|insights. Our VIA|insights offering includes a data warehouse and analytics solution based upon the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and SQL Server. Users can access the data warehouse using standard Microsoft tool including Excel, Sharepoint, and Power BI.
Now everyone in your organization has access to the single version of the truth knowing that the data has been validated and that it will be accurate. It opens up broad areas of information to the user base that were never before available. The data becomes powerful, meaningful and actionable. Many organizations are amazed by what they can measure and compare in order to generate insights for their area of the business.
Accuvia Software Group will be exhibiting at the NRF show in New York in January. We will be demonstrating a comprehensive solution for retailers that including our advanced POS and Loyalty solutions along with our business intelligence and data warehouse solution with Infodepth. Together we make a powerful team ready to bring the store of the future to our retail clients today.
