When customers go shopping, they expect to be able to find the products they want at a convenient location at the right price point. Pulling this off effectively and consistently requires retailers to consider disparate types of information including an in-depth analysis of the supply chain and consumer purchasing trends. In short, coming up with a cohesive strategy often involves a lot of educated guesses.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Artificial intelligence is here to help. Data management services can help companies ingest and consolidate large amounts of data from different sources in varying formats, detect patterns and respond in real time with a retail data analysis.
The challenge
As a brand or a retailer, you are likely sitting on mounds of data: Sales data, point of sale execution data, market research.
But acquiring this data is only half the battle. To achieve a successful digital transformation, brands and retailers need to figure out a way to nimbly use this data to predict market trends, effectively launch new products, improve productivity, and increase revenue.
Monitoring and analyzing large amounts of data — like sell-in, sell-out, forecast, external stock data, point of sale execution and market research — is a gargantuan challenge for brands and retailers.
Adding to this challenge is the fact that data often comes from clients in different forms, making it hard to store, analyze and transform into useful and actionable information.
Having different data sets can be worse than having no data at all: Misaligned data sets cause analysis errors, which can lead to misguided business strategies.
The solution
Data harmonization tools like Storecheck Hub aggregate data from different sources and instantly organize it in a single data integration platform, making it easier to identify business opportunities, devise strategies and implement them right away.
How does it work?
Using AI, your platform of choice can automatically collect information from all sources. The data is then cleaned, validated and harmonized into a standard language.
Algorithms then analyze the data and align it to KPIs to generate reports which can help improve everything from inventory management to productivity to point of sale execution.
Storecheck Hub also offers instant reports to get an immediate picture of sales performance, identify product shortages and root causes, improve your forecast and monitor your offers and launches.
Conclusion
If you want to take advantage of the power of data management and analytics, data harmonization should be one of your very first goals. Unless data sets are harmonized, their true power can never be realized. By unifying the numbers, data harmonization tools help unify organizations by allowing everyone work with same data points and arrive at the same conclusions.
Given all of this, it’s no surprise that retailers that adopt AI into their retail data harmonization and processing have an advantage over competitors still making educated guesses.
Want to know more about how to make your data work for you? Reach out to Storecheck to learn more about Hub and other AI solutions for retail.
