Retail Data Delivers What Consumers Want

| PLM | Insights & Analytics
Posted By: Trace One

Issues 

First, the good news: Retailers have an abundance of business data available across their retail systems. The bad news: They often feel overwhelmed by the volume of data and uncertain of how to manage it all. At the moment, retailers lack a single source of data they can rely on to make decisions – especially for Private Label products. Their data is scattered across multiple systems, hidden in functional silos and captive in multiple formats, including Excel spreadsheets.

 

To keep up with consumer trends (and increasingly intense competition), retailers need a way to make sense of their bounty of Private Label data. They need meaningful business intelligence that leads to smarter business decisions.

 

Making sense of retail data

To quickly adapt to market trends, retailers need to transform their data into actionable business insights. Gaining a holistic view of their business helps retailers make decisions that solve business challenges with greater speed and superior results.

 

In response, data insight solutions can help companies improve efficiencies, time to market and business performance by enabling retail stakeholders to connect the dots, accelerate product development and gain a competitive advantage. Most importantly, data allows companies to serve consumers better and faster by increasing their efficiency and agility to deliver a superior customer experience.

 

How consumers win

Today’s consumers want to know where products have been sourced from, including the country or region, and the supplier’s name. They also demand to know what ingredients are in their products.

 

Retailers can use data insight solutions to track data on a Private Label product’s origin. These solutions can also help retailers identify products within their assortment that align with consumers’ health and wellness concerns, including foods containing less fat, sugar, salt or including certified sustainable palm oil.

 

To align with consumer demand for corporate social responsibility (CSR), retailers can easily identify products within their assortment that do or do not comply with CSR trends such as health and wellness, fair trade and sustainability.

 

How companies win

Data also helps to improve internal operations. For instance, retailers can manage their workload more efficiently by accessing data reflecting project allocation across the entire organization. The solution is open and versatile, allowing dashboards that meet the needs of different functional areas. Using business intelligence from data insight solutions, retailers can gain visibility into details such as changes in the cost of raw materials and packaging, that can give buyers arguments to better negotiate with their suppliers.

 

As a result, the ability to make fact-based decisions using data insights, can help retailers deliver innovative Private Label products that consumers want. By gaining greater visibility, retailers can find new opportunities for innovation that align with consumer demand. Data insights can also boost agility by pinpointing and resolving project management risks and bottlenecks faster.