The retail industry is complex and is guided a lot by – The Customer. But are companies analyzing what that the customer wants and what they are buying? But considering the complexity of the sector, it is important to understand various parameters involved like the return policies and operations, supplier collaboration, merchandise disposition, etc. and for all understanding, the parameters involved, utilizing the data generated is of prime importance. Here is where Business Intelligence comes into play.
With Business Intelligence, we can focus on important variables of the day-to-day operations of the business, like stock availability, sales according to SKU, products, and based on the geography, overhead costs, etc. to enhance the financial and operational performance of the company. With this blog, we intend to let the users understand the relevance of Business Intelligence to the Retail Industry.
Before we get into the specifics of how BI would be useful for Retail, is it important to understand how the culture of Data Analytics and BI is helpful to an organization.
Key Dynamics of Business Intelligence
We cannot enforce the idea enough that a data-driven organization would be the one that can notice changes soon enough to make changes for the future. For that keeping an eye on the current metrics is vital and Business Intelligence tools help you with the same, and in a way with Visualizations and connecting you with data directly. Some of the key BI uses are:
Data Visualization: Everyone is bored of tables. Tables i.e., Relational data representation have become one of the archaic ways of representing data. With tools like Power BI and tableau, you have seen data being represented in multiple ways like graphs, bar charts, pie charts, stacked charts, and much more. With all these being represented in the form of dashboards, analysis has been made easy. You can customize metrics relevant to your business as per your needs to streamline decision-making and take faster decisions.
Predictive Analysis: We know we are going a little ahead of ourselves with predictive analysis, but it is possible. Though most people restrict their BI tools and capabilities to Descriptive and Diagnostic Analytics, Predictive Analytics is achievable with tools like Power BI which is connected to Azure ML and other tools. This can help you in finalizing business decisions which can help in driving business and impacting your company’s future growth.
Reporting: Business Intelligence tools help you streamline the process of reporting with easy sharing and the creation of dashboards. Take Qlik’s DAR- Dashboarding – Reporting – Analysis or Tableau’s Storyboard features you can identify that Reporting is an integral part of the Business Intelligence ecosystem. With streamlined reporting, you can gather data from all over your company (we mean the data warehouse or the data lake that you have integrated your data with) to can make reports with required KPIs and share across the organization even with Row-Level Security as required.
All in all, we mean to say that you can create your Data Stories with Business Intelligence. Take an e-commerce firm, for example, some of the parameters that need to be analyzed are the sales by product category, geography, the discount effect, etc., if you are a seller you might want the correlation with the product display page and the buying rate. Everything can be analyzed with the right set of data for you to decide on.
Advantages of Business Intelligence in Retail Industry
Now that you have read some of the advantages Business Intelligence might provide to your firm, irrespective of the industry you might be curious as to the key advantages it might have with the Retail Industry, so let’s proceed with that. We were talking about the complexities of the Retail Industry at the start, and it is to solve these complexities that Business Intelligence is important.
Optimize processes
The retail supply chain is filled with multiple nodes and multiple touchpoints, wherein there are chances of errors, let it be the defective pieces in the manufacturing process (where the processes are not lean or don’t follow six sigma practices) or the lack of a streamlined return process. One of the key questions you can always ask yourselves is that is there more place to optimize processes? For example, organizations like Swiggy or Grofers are not offering 10-15 min delivery times based on the traffic but on the proximity of the location of their Warehouse, similarly is there a possibility for you to enhance your customer needs and increase the “stickiness” of the customers with your organization.
Know your customer
We don’t need to tell you this. There is no supply without demand and if you are unable to analyze existing demand or identify the trends of newer demand you will be experiencing loss. Knowing your customer is important, whether you are online-based or a brick-and-mortar shop. With BI tools, you can analyze structured and semi-structured data to gain insights about your sales process, customers, and their user flow (like Click-stream analytics).
Connect with customer
Just knowing your customer is no longer enough. It is important to connect with them. BI helps your company to first understand what makes your customers tick, and then to use that information in a meaningful way to interact with them on a personal level. And with Sales and Marketing taking up an important chunk of the budget, this process will help you save time and money, and you'll be able to plan more successfully.
We can go on and on with a bigger list talking about improving decision-making, keeping an eye on the key parameters, or how you can use real-time data for making decisions, but you get the gist. But this is not the end of analytics for Retail, BI can form the stepping-stone for building a data-driven organization or leverage customer analytics to strategize your business goals. But if you’re looking for Business Intelligence Implementation in Retail we’d advise you to look for Implementation partners with industry and technical expertise to help solve your business problems and get an end-to-end BI implementation.
