The Profitable Retailer

The retail industry is a fast and competitive space. The age of the empowered consumer, enabled with fingertip technology through smart phones is one reason why. Some suggest that this scenario has retailers worried, and it does, especially if efforts are not made to ensure the delicate thread of supply chain, merchandising, and marketing are in sync to enable profitability in retail. With the rise of multi channel and the empowered consumer, it’s more important than ever to strive for excellence in business processes.

The common thread that can enable profitability across the business is data… good, clean data. From customer, to product/material, to vendor, clean data is critical to ensuring supremacy in performance.  In this sense, the vastly growing data that lives in multiple systems in your organization is a gold mine. Harnessing this data can help transform the foundation of a retailer’s business decisions and enable sales growth and profitability. Knowing and understanding your customers, products, and vendors can add millions of dollars to your bottom line and position you to compete better over time.

SAP Retail and Utopia Inc. are teaming up to provide a free webcast on the 7^th of September that will deal with this topic and provide valuable insight into best practices for success in this area. You will learn from Retail Industry and Data Quality experts, Gerry Yeo and Frank Dravis about:

• Key retail-industry trends and opportunities
• How consolidating product and vendor data is key to success in retailing
• How to overcome obstacles in data quality to enable data governance

You can register for the webcast here https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/509667443

Visibility into Sales Velocity in Retail

There is a race of sorts among retailers to ensure their current and future success in the industry. It’s a race of analytic proportions to gain insight into consumer behavior, customer satisfaction, and profitability. To make things more interesting, this race is run against the  backdrop of extreme competition to win the hearts and wallets of customers. When we add the reality of “Big Data” to this conversation, we can begin to imagine how challenging it is for retailers to leverage all their valuable, disparate, and growing volumes of data in order to successfully manage the performance of their business.

Analyzing metrics such as impact of promotions on stock levels is just one element to consider. It’s important because managing your stock levels against the performance of your promotion can lead to success or customer dissatisfaction. For instance, out of stock issues was designated as the biggest contributor  to lost sales opportunity and customer satisfaction. Having visibility into this metric in real time will enable an appropriate response and allocation of stock to eliminate out of stock scenarios to increase sales , while also increasing customer satisfaction for long term retention.

To learn more about this topic, you can register for the following webinar where leading minds in retail will discuss some of the best things you can do to flawlessly execute your retail strategy this holiday season.   Register  

The Horizon of Innovation for Business

The last 15 years has brought us the boom of business intelligence as a mission critical application for decision support. As the BI landscape evolved, the critical nature of timely, accurate, information did as well. For most, venturing into this necessary space has brought with it some hard lessons learned on the BI highway. Most of these hard lessons find their roots in the information management practices of organizations.

Information Management – and in its greater sense, Data Governance – has become a critical focus for consideration among businesses serious about growth and profit. Looking back some years, information management was a mere afterthought to the pressing need for BI reporting. Hard to believe the irony, right? Times have definitely changed and so has the technological horizon for how to harness the power of information to improve the business. Here are three areas to consider as you venture deeper into the world of business intelligence.

The Value of Metadata

Metadata is the enabler of data governance. The “data about the data”, in other words, harnessed with the right enabling technology, will help an organization establish standards around data definitions, track and manage impact across systems, trace data values from report to source and much more. Effectively, this is the road to governance and ultimately it is about creating an environment where data capture processes can be analyzed and improved upon.

Agility of Information Access

BI projects can consume resources very quickly. From the outset, a request for information can lead to lengthy processes of brining disparate data and technology together. Without a nimble, or “agile” way to tap the value of information in a business, the cost and the pain around failed BI projects come together in force. Here is where a unified and integrated BI architecture can be helpful. By combining information management and data quality capabilities with the BI platform presentation layer, information can be accessed and integrated in a timely fashion. Sharing metadata and supporting one environment are other key benefits of doing this.

The Power of Now

The conversation of “in-memory” is making waves is a disruptive fashion in the industry. The concept of moving the data warehouse from disk to memory is at first daunting, but, as we’ve heard so often lately, very possible. The future is even more interesting as visions have been cast for the entire data tier in an organization to eventually live in memory. Can you imagine lightning quick analysis capabilities in real time? Terabytes in milliseconds? Coming to terms with the possibility of running the enterprise in memory (ERP) is at once daunting and inspiring.

It is inspiring because for the first time, we are on the horizon of serious innovation for business. Drastic innovations in technology are making this possible and businesses should take note. As the speed of business is rapidly increasing, a company’s need to leverage technology to align their strategy with execution should follow suit. For at the end of the day the stakes are too high not to and it will all come down to one’s ability to evolve their information management practices.

Business Intelligence: Tools of the Trade for Decision Makers

Mac News World has an interesitng article about Business Intelligence that is a must read. Not only is there increasing demand because ot the sheer velocity of data these days, but economic recovery and success (or failure) hang in the balance for those who either do or don’t jump on the BI bandwagon.

Here is the article:

Business intelligence is all about speed — it gives corporate decision makers the modeling tools they need to make complex and important decisions quickly. Just as important as offering a forward view, however, BI allows executives to look back and find out what happened when something went wrong.

In this age of hype and hysteria, nearly every IT product peddled comes with the dire warning “if you do not buy, you die.” On a few occasions, however, that claim proves true in the biggest, most unmistakable ways.

“It can easily be argued that our current world economic crisis can be partially blamed on poor business intelligence,” Boris Evelson, an analyst at Forrester, told CRM Buyer. “Government and business leaders ignored the information, made decisions based on wrong information, or made wrong decisions based on right information.”

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Report on Mid market BI

WiseAnalytics recently conducted a survey targeted at midmarket organizations using or considering business intelligence (BI). The goal of the survey was to identify adoption rates, general awareness and satisfaction with BI in general and targeted midmarket solutions specifically.

 

DM Review participated in survey distribution through Web site and newsletter promotions. The information in the report represents a subset of the overall responses and is based solely on the answers provided by DM Review participants (87 in total).

Please click here to read the entire article.

How the ERP & BI conversation is changing

If you have kept yourself informed about the Business Intelligence consolidation in the ERP space, then you are probably aware that such aquisitions can have conversation changing implications in the software world. The big ones so far are Oracle and Hyperion/Siebal, SAP & Business Objects, and IBM/Cognos. If we survey the landscape closely, it becomes clear that customers and vendors are telling us something important with these moves. Here are three ways that the conversation is changing.

1. Getting Data Out of an Organization is Just as Important as Getting Data In.

Initially, as the ERP market developed, some would argue that the paramount conversation was about standardizing on business process with a common platform. Leveraging the data that ERP could capture and offer to the business was more of an afterthought. Execution on business process was the main focus. However, with the consolidations we have seen, customers, and in turn, vendors, are telling us that leveraging that data to execute on strategy (BI) is just as important. In one sense, the coming together of ERP and BI is akin to bringing two critical sides of an important business coin together. Getting data in is as important as getting data out. Customers know it (mostly), and the industry is responding. This offers existing ERP vendors the ability to have a new and more valuable conversation with their prospects and customers.

2. Beginning with the End in Mind

It is becoming clear that companies who venture down the ERP road should really begin with the end in mind. What does that mean? What if the starting conversation revolved around a company’s primary strategic objectives across the board and how visualizing the relevant data could help them reach those goals? It makes sense to talk about ERP and executing strategy (BI) at the same time because the resulting information of streamlined business processes needs to be leveraged to drive competitive differentiation, operational efficiency, and improved profitability. At the end of the day, these are an organization’s highest concerns and Business Intelligence is the way to deliver the type of visibility that will drive performance improvements. The crux is to deliver ERP and BI in tandem to help fulfill the end vision and encourage user adoption. So maybe the best way to start an ERP conversation is with a consolidated dashboard that visualizes an organizations key metrics?

3. Easing the Implementation Burden

It is no secret that ERP prospects cringe less at the cost of software than the services. Implementation costs are high. But the conversation is changing in this area as well. Conventionally, discussions about a customer’s legacy data would happen at the system integrator level and the services scope would include a component of data cleansing work that would make the data ERP ready. Unfortunately, most customers fail to adequately understand the services cost to this. Often this is a manual process that takes much time and therefore dollars. Here is where SAP has a new and valuable advantage. The Business Objects Data Quality tools (formerly First Logic) acquired by SAP can help a customer establish a DQ process to quickly de-duplicate, cleanse, standardize, and set business rules around their critical data before it goes into SAP. This is the first step to realizing a data governance vision and it will greatly reduce the time it takes to make data ERP ready. The sad alternative, for companies who fail to acknowledge and complete the data quality task, is to spend too much on services, or put their ERP implementation at risk with bad data. Garbage in, garbage out, as the old adage goes.

Planning a Successful Business Intelligence Project

Here is the first part of an excellent two part article by Maureen Clarry at the b-eye network. In it she discusses the roles and responsibilities of BI teams at the program and project level. It is true that many BI projects fail because of improper planning and this article is a helpful guide to companies wishing to embark on BI projects successfully. What is important to note (and refreshing) is that the roles Maureen outlines include those for data responsibility. This is important in that approaching BI requires careful consideration of how information will flow through a supportive architecture from source to report. Failing to consider this often leaves organizations with a short sighted perspective of BI and a hodgepodge of tools without ability to provide any form of governance. Enjoy the article!

Data Governance

Jill Dyche, from the b-eye network, has written a great article on implementing data governance through the challenges of organizational change. In one sense, what contributes to data governance failure is the ever existing chasm between IT and business. A key take-away for success is to not stop at the vision of data governance, but to ensure you are driving the change down to the personal level. This means that attention be given to gathering feedback and employee level input on the change in process. This is a must read for anyone serious about data governance.

Worthwhile Links

Here is a list of links that you may find helpful….

Data Warehousing: Is a Consolidation Craze Ahead?

Behind the Business Objects-Oco SaaS Deal

Green BI?

The “Edge” Business Objects has in the Mid Market. Here is the press release.

How to market your BI Program

Top 10 Reasons why people are making SOA fail

The Non-Traditional Data Conundrum

How to Manage Your Data As an Asset

Six BI Trends You Can’t Ignore

Michael Corcoran, VP at IBI, has written a good article about trends in the BI space that one shouldn’t ignore. The gist of it suggests that more people are demanding information and delivering it to users in a way that is simple and mobile. Have a read for yourself.

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Business intelligence (BI) technology has had a tremendous impact on decision-making activities at most companies. In the last several years, it has become one of the most commonly deployed software technologies in the business world, helping executives, managers, and professional analysts stay in touch with current activities.

From an end-user standpoint, however, BI technology is only beginning to reach its potential. In this article, I identify six ways to boost BI adoption rates and drive greater return on your BI investments.

1: Serve a Wider Audience

For years we have been hearing about how BI is moving out to the masses. Vendors are making their BI software more accessible to casual users, and customers are creating BI applications that reach a broad spectrum of the user population. The more consumers of information you have, the greater the value you will obtain from your BI efforts.

To truly deliver BI to everyone in your organization, you have to be able to provide users with a high degree of sophistication via a very simple interface that requires no training. When it comes to reporting, developers should create universal, parameter-driven reports that offer thousands of potential outputs — without requiring users to understand how to use a BI “tool” at all. Successful BI practitioners follow this “guided ad hoc” approach to make business intelligence easy to digest, guiding users to the answers they need. Also, each menu or form should include a subscription or scheduling option, so users can request regular updates via e-mail.

Once the right information is easily available, everybody in your organization becomes a potential decision maker, whether they work in customer service, shipping, manufacturing, finance, or just about any other area. Whether you call it “consumer BI,” “pervasive BI,” or “BI for the masses,” the focus has shifted from BI professionals, who need complex tools to create and analyze information, to everyday workers who simply want to access content in meaningful ways.

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