Effective business analytics tools yield insights that can help retailers operate more efficiently and profitably.
Retailers have used the most basic form of business intelligence for as long as they have been buying and selling goods to their customers. Consider all the factors that went into successfully running a typical colonial-era general store. Owners had to anticipate factors such as increased demand for farming instruments around harvest time, or the desire of customers to purchase fresh fruit as soon as it was in season.
But decisions these retailers made were often based on insufficient information. Today, the problem is almost the complete opposite. Many retailers find they have too much information to turn into actionable insights without hiring very specialized — and expensive — expert help.
“Business intelligence has been around for a very long time, but we are still at the early stages of being able to take something like Big Data and operationalize it for retail,” said Brad Shimmin, service director for business technology and software at Current Analysis. “The first steps to take advantage of that happened in the 1980s and 90s, where we saw firms putting sales and customer data into big repositories where they could query it to try to make valid connections.”
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