Data management and analytics company 1010data announced the latest version of its Consumer Insights Platform (CIP), which includes Advanced Product Visibility (APV), a suite of reports designed to help identify the root causes of out-of-stock and hard-to-acquire inventory.
The platform is an analytical collaboration solution that allows retailers and their suppliers to gain insight into how well key categories and products are performing, with stock keeping unit (SKU)-level precision.
“Clients were looking for even more flexibility in the ways they are able to look at the data, save their report templates, and graphically represent the outputs of their analyses,” Silvia Lacayo, product marketing manager of retail and brands for 1010data, told eWEEK. “In addition, clients were interested in additional capabilities for understanding the on-shelf availability of their products, which led to the development of 1010data’s Advanced Product Visibility suite of reports.”
Retailers today are faced with finding effective ways to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse, and increasingly savvy, customer base, she noted.
“To be able to execute the best promotional programs and the right marketing campaigns that will drive awareness, engage customers and ultimately lead to sales, retailers must first be able to understand how their businesses are performing at the most granular level: across sales, promotions, and supply chain metrics by basket, by planogram or by store,” she said.
Understanding the retail business at this level of depth, she said, means leveraging the large volumes of data that are generated every day across all store locations.
“Being able to organize and analyze this data efficiently in a timely manner is key to remaining competitive in today’s landscape,” she said. “Success stories abound in the retail space in no smaller part due to retailers embracing big data.”
The category manager dashboard provides a top-level view of how a business is performing across multiple metrics, allowing users in various areas including category management, sales, supply chain and marketing to access key performance highlights and share them with executive leadership.
An improved user interface with drilling capabilities offers an interactive grid interface that enables users to click through their selections and drill down to the next level of reporting and insights.
Finally, enhanced visualization enables users to turn the output of popular reports into additional charts and graphs of their choice for faster and easier decision-making.
“The retail environment will only get more complex with the continued expansion of e-commerce, the growing integration between offline and online shopping, and the increased customer demand for variety, convenience and value-added experiences,” Lacayo said. “Retailer-specific big data is already being leveraged by retailers across their own sales, supply chain and loyalty programs; however, the difference between what most retailers are doing today and what they will need to do in the not-so-distant future is to embrace big data as a discipline.”