Business Intelligence in the Retail Environment: The Top Ten Ways for Retailers to Leverage BI

While it has become commonplace for retailers to implement data warehouses to analyze sales, increasingly they are analyzing more data and making the analysis available to more individuals in the organization. This has led to a second wave of adoption where an increased number of functional roles are using business intelligence technologies and techniques to get a better understanding of the performance of their business.

This paper reviews the ten areas of the business where retailers are having the most success with implementing business intelligence.

Business Intelligence in the Retail Environment: Assortment Planning

In the past twenty years retailers have invested profusely in computerized tools, resulting in huge databases of sales information. However, analyses supporting assortment planning decision making process are still nascent or non-existent in most retail operations. Given the development of business intelligence (BI) applications in the last five years, an opportunity has arisen for retailers to harness BI tools to enhance the accuracy of their assortment planning. The first retailers to do this have achieved some competitive advantages in their markets, and inevitably, the approach is likely to become common practice as incremental benefits are gained and documented.

Business Intelligence in the Retail Environment: Loss Prevention

Leveraging the richness of transactional and operational data captured across the enterprise, organizations can achieve unprecedented visibility into business processes and operations. The use of business intelligence to provide timely access to key information and of benchmark indicators to automatically isolate significant events helps retailers to realize multiple benefits including increased productivity through automation, greater security and control over their data, re-usability of integrated data sets by other teams within the organization, a more tightly integrated evidence chain, and ease of analysis across multiple presentation channels. Retailers leveraging business intelligence for loss prevention can significantly improve their ability to protect their assets, uncover the root causes of shrink, and detect fraud.

Business Intelligence in the Retail Environment: Inventory Improvements

Many retailers lack timely and accurate visibility into their inventory management processes, creating blindspots which, left unresolved, will continue to negatively effect operational efficiency. Business intelligence is enabling retailers to gain critical insight within their inventory management without impacting daily operations. By extracting information from disparate source systems into a centralized enterprise data warehouse, retailers are concurrently reporting on metrics related to their supply chain, sales, production, and internal operations to make better, fact-based business decisions.

This paper details how leading retailers are using business intelligence to increase visiblity and improve overall inventory management within their organization.