Connected Data is essential to make smarter decisions and keep goods flowing
For the past 40 years, retailers have successfully embraced the use of data, whether this is data captured on sales, customers and supply chain to name a few.
The pandemic changed the way we live, think, behave, and shop. The profound change brought about in 2020, encouraged many retailer to reconsider the agility of their data & analytics.
In order to turn the continuous data captured into insight which results in action, retailers must connect their data with speed and agility across their organisation to have any chance of applying truly intelligent decisions.
Significant shifts in our lives and how we engage with retail cannot be any more evident that the way we shop for goods. According to the ONS.Gov.UK the percentage of internet sales as a total sales ratio reached over 30% by the end of Q2 2020, leaping over 12% from 2019 figures reported.
Many more people are working from home and deciding they do not want to go out to purchase goods, but instead choosing the convenience and security of having their shopping delivered in a safe environment. This will have massively challenged retailers’ supply chain and logistics capabilities to serve the new ‘stay at home’ consumer.
Rather than the old retail model of delivering goods directly from the distribution centres to physical stores and assume consumers will visit in their droves, now retailers are having to ensure the relevant data is available to determine how many drivers and vehicles they need, accurately plan capacity and inventory, shape routes versus locations, and forecast the equipment and colleagues they will need to pick and deliver the goods to the consumer before the orders are even placed. This fundamentally changes the way retailers skill up staff, the investments they make and how they best serve the consumer.
Behind the scenes of making this smooth transition in the way goods are delivered is the critical requirement of connecting and delivering data seamlessly through the organisation. Having the capability to orchestrate and move the data so it can be put into the hands of decisions makers and operational colleagues is, in fact, just as critical to the business as it is to have the goods delivered to the consumer.
That’s why cloud adoption is growing exponentially, and is a key enabler to every digital transformation. The evolution to cloud has allowed the data and analytics to undergo a tremendous shift in the way data is made available, connected and served to business decision makers. For many years, organisations relied on data marts and on-premises data warehouses to power business intelligence (BI) and reporting systems. Today that is simply not enough.
As retailers start to look to modernise data in the cloud, they will need industry-leading, best-of-breed data management capabilities optimised and built for cloud-native environments, which is why Sempre Analytics is excited to be partnering with Informatica to help retailers on this journey.
