Benefits of Embedded Analytics and BI in the Retail Industry
Introduction
Competition in the retail industry is never-ending. All retail businesses strive to increase their popularity and make more profit. Identifying the market demands and being the supplier to those needs will help you achieve your retail business goals. Bold BI enables you to analyze your business data and track your important KPIs within your software applications. Adopting the right embedded analytics in your business software helps you break down the data and find the insights that empower you to make timely decisions that benefit the growth of your business. In this blog post, I will give you an overview of embedded analytics and why it is so important. Then, we’ll talk about how embedded analytics helps you achieve your business goals. Here is our agenda:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in the retail industry.
- How to embed analytical tools into retail domain apps.
- Bold BI’s retail solution dashboard examples.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams and delivers all the insights you need to improve administrative and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedded analytics in the retail industry
Using embedded analytics helps you uncover the challenges present in the retail industry and enables you to devise strategies to overcome them. Deploying an embedded analytics program will help you in improving inventory management, customer retention, and more. These are the key areas in which embedded analytics helps improve retail business:
- Optimized inventory management.
- Enhanced in-store operations.
- Increased customer retention rate.
- Improved performance and increased revenue.
Optimized inventory management
Harnessing embedded analytics in your software application helps you actively monitor inventory management metrics such as inventory turnover ratio, stock availability, average inventory value by product category, top-selling items, and more. Monitoring these metrics helps you know about market fluctuations, top-selling goods, and more, which gives you insights into the product demands and enables you to stock up the products that are needed most. Also, managing inventory based on market demands gives you an edge over your competitors.
Enhanced in-store operations
In-store operations play a vital role in retail. Providing a better experience to your customer will help you earn higher profits. Embedded analytics helps you monitor metrics such as total visitor count, average basket size, and more. Using these metrics, you can get insights on the maximum customer visits per day and recruit additional staff accordingly to avoid congestion at checkout. In addition, you can use these insights to make decision about decorating stores and design better marketing campaigns to help you attract more customers, which in turn delivers more revenue.
Increased customer retention rate
The needs of a customer change every day. Predicting customer needs and catering to them help you gain more customers and retain them for a longer period. Embedded analytics enables you to predict customer needs by analyzing purchase patterns, determining average basket value, and recommending specific products. Also, launching a customer loyalty program and providing unique rewards will attract more customers and help you increase the customer retention rate.
Improved performance and increased revenue
Embedding analytics helps you improve your business’s performance by tracking key metrics like sales per square foot, average unit retail, sales volume by store, and more. Using these metrics, you can learn about your industry’s actual performance and devise strategies like expanding stores in prime locations, providing competitive offers to customers, making timely and faster deliveries, and more. This will help you increase performance and eventually increase the revenue of your business.
How to embed analytical tools into retail domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into retail web applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in more than 10 web app platforms, including ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario where your retail company has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI Embedded and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboards successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Creating an Angular application
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you need to create an Angular application. To do that, first, you need create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI Enterprise, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI Enterprise, you should use `enterprise`.apiHost : An ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.
After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance
We create a Bold BI instance to help us communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (the new Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server, and this authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as user email, group data, and embed signature. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI Embedded instance.
Step 4: Running the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard
In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Bold BI’s retail solution dashboard examples
Retail Store Performance Dashboard
By embedding the Retail Store Performance Dashboard, the store managers and sales managers can analyze key performance indicators and metrics that are helpful in evaluating how a store has performed in the last month. This helps track the health of the business over time.
Key metrics and KPIs
Average units in retail: Shows the average amount spent for a particular type of item. It is calculated by dividing the total sales by the number of sold items.
Average basket size: Shows the average number of items sold in a single purchase.
Total visitor count: Shows the number of buyers and non-buyers in the stores.
Average basket value: Shows the average value spent per customer per transaction in the store.
Sales and gross profit by category: Shows the product category’s sales volume and gross profit value.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Retail Store Performance dashboard example.
Retail Inventory Management Dashboard
By embedding the Retail Inventory Management Dashboard, you can track the retail store’s inventory management. Aiming to help inventory managers and store managers, this dashboard shows key performance indicators that are helpful in identifying the right products and proper inventory in each department. This dashboard also lets you track orders placed and returned goods.
Key metrics and KPIs
Inventory turnover ratio: Shows the inventory turnover ratio which is calculated by dividing the COGS (cost of goods sold) by the average inventory.
Gross margin return on investment: Shows the company’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory.
Average inventory value by product category: Shows the average inventory value which is calculated by averaging the starting and ending inventory values over a specific time period.
Top selling items: Shows the number of items which are sold the most.
Returned items by product category: Shows the number of items that customers have returned in each product category and their reasons.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Retail inventory Management Dashboard demo.
Conclusion
Bold BI Embedded helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more, seamlessly. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help businesses in the retail industry be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI Embedded’s 35 widgets and 130 supported data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, schedule a free 30-minute demo with our experts about creating dashboards and any other features you would like to learn more about. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on December 15, 2021.
