Business Benefits Of A Retail BI Solution

There are many business benefits to an integrated analytical infrastructure. An integrated BI environment ensures:

• Critical planning, analysis, and reporting is faster and more accurately.
• Sales planning, which relies on sales volumes, margins, bonuses and commissions will now take hours instead of days or weeks.
• Changes in one system are reflected in other areas in near real time. This means that if merchandising plans change, sophisticated allocations can be used to drive those changes through the retailer’s operating plans, at all levels.

Sales projections can have a huge impact on the production schedules and capabilities of suppliers. Using the collaboration capabilities of a web based BI solution, suppliers and other external stakeholders can be included in planning and analysis processes.

Store Operations - insights and cost efficiencies gained from new analysis tools will identify both current flaws in decision logic and operational effectiveness, as well as future insight into competitive strategy. For instance, one large retailer determined found payroll analysis and planning saved the company $10,000,000 during the first year, based upon saving just one labor hour per day per store for the entire year. Factor in the size and number of stores, this single revelation will result in millions of dollars in cost savings while more accurately deploying resources at each store.

Corporate - savings and efficiencies within corporate departments identified using the same analytical platform result from even the smallest improvement margins – for every dollar gained in margin, can result in five dollars added to the bottom line.

With such small margins throughout the retail industry, every dollar saved adds up. It is not so much the cost of implementing a BI infrastructure, rather the significantly higher cost of NOT doing so.

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