The emergence of retail business intelligence for retailers worldwide
The retail analytics industry is constantly evolving, meaning there is a myriad of data and analytics collected every single day — from emerging trends and sales, to changes in the global market and everything in between.
As fast-paced and insightful the retail industry is, it has been rather a slow bloomer in adopting business intelligence. Considering the insight and decision-making abilities that a business intelligence solution might provide, the retail industry has not full grasped the opportunity that was available to them before other sectors such as technology and finance.
How retail business intelligence is making a difference
The purpose of business intelligence tools is to generate data and analytics, which provides increased insight and visibility into day-to-day operations, in a digestible format.
Generally, the retail market works on low net profit rates (between 1.5% to 5%), indicating that optimisation and cost-cutting matters significantly. Below mentioned are some of the key areas where the application of business intelligence is drastically making an improvement, enabling retailers to grow their businesses.
Costs, stock management, and prices
With a low net profit margin, pricing a product dynamically but remain competitive is a real challenge. All costs of doing business has to be taken into consideration as well as unexpected situations. However, retail business intelligence can not only aid in determining the right price, but can also assist in seasonal-based decision making.
Through the proper application, a business can solve one of the greatest challenges of the retail industry of stock level management. With the help of the business intelligence application, you can not only monitor the real-time inventory but also set up an automated purchasing system based on the past purchasing trends.
Customer analytics
Understanding the right pattern can unlock a greater customer relation potential. Through understanding reports from retail business intelligence, the organisation can observe the customers buying habits like preferred payment method, time spent in store and walk-in pattern. Decision made based on these reports, in turn, helps provide customers with a better experience while optimising the business processes.
Vendor management and evaluation
Vendor evaluation is a key factor in a business’s growth. With a retail business intelligence solution, you can evaluate the factors such as client satisfaction, delivery time and brand perception.
Planning and forecasting
Planning your next steps based on previous months’ performance is no longer limited. With the BI system in place, the user can instantaneously view the performance of a store and can even foresee factors affecting it.
The Populous World XBRL platform (PXP) offers business intelligence solutions, and provides an easier understanding of data visualisation, accelerates a business’s growth and achieve longevity, by using advanced block chain and big data processing technologies effectively.
With the platform, retailers and investors can access reports, which compresses weighty statistics into digestible information.
Lou Chan, Populous World.
