Industries > Retail and Consumer Products

Retail and consumer goods today must be more than products and services. They must be customer experiences.

Customers are more judicious than ever. Courting their favor requires business intelligence—but to protect your profitability, you must be judicious, too, in the BI you choose.

Consumer behavior is rebooting in the wake of the global recession. Though purchases are picking up some speed, consumers have become more insistent on quality at a reasonable price, and more willing to walk away when they don’t find it. In other words, they demand value.

Similarly, retailers and makers of consumer goods demand value for their investments, especially with current competitive pressures. Point solutions are common in this industry because their value statement is clear. But here’s what’s happening: their resulting value is not. Point solutions often create a fractured environment where systems and departments share information only through time-consuming manual intervention.

An integrated BI program is the key to information collection and sharing that frees retailers for high value-added tasks, like mining transactional and database information to glean customer intelligence. BI is also the key to shaping the experiences that customers crave: with the right data at the right time, retailers can finely tune the customer experience to surpass expectations.

So for companies in this industry, Clarity delivers BI with special attention to value. We understand that your information needs are great, while your margins may not be. In fact, staying ahead of them as they shrink to ever more slender proportions is a constant pressure.  It makes sense to focus a business like this on analysis and planning, and most retailers already perform historical sales analyses using the vast amounts of transational data captured by operational and POS systems.

 

Clarity can help retailers take a big step forward and embed analytics into these operational and POS systems. With embedded analytics, you can do more than correct and calibrate decisions in hindsight. You can react more quickly to events on the floor, perform future sales analysis, anticipate trends, create more targeted campaigns, and plan strategically beyond the next quarter.

In fact, you may be closer to these capabilities than you think--a cohesive information architecture is often the key missing ingredient that stands between retail organizations and greater BI maturity. Working with your current infrastructure, processes, systems, and data models, Clarity’s solution and information architects can connect them to create an analytical platform. The result is that you'll start translating the data you collect anyway into information you can use more effectively.

For more information, contact us today.