Accelerating Retail decisions with real-time data

Brief

Europe’s largest health and well-being retailer accelerates the pace of retail business decision making by implementing a data lake to enable stores to respond in real-time to customer needs.

About the client

The client is Europe’s largest health and well-being retailer of branded and own-label products across a wide range of vitamins, supplements, specialist food, sports nutrition, and ethical beauty. Founded in 1870, they focus on making people healthier and happier, operating more than 1300 stores worldwide as well as an expanding e-commerce business.

Challenge | Continuous product innovation requires real-time data

The client constantly innovates to meet customers’ needs, whether it is ethical sourcing or digital transformation to provide a world-class shopping experience. Continuous product innovation requires the client to better harness their data in real-time to make decisions such as refilling store inventory to avoid stock-outs, product manufacturing batch-sizes, offering new discounts, promotions, and customer rewards.

The business decision making was based on spreadsheets using data collected in silos from diverse systems and sources such as stores, audited sales, online sales, and SKU/stock data. This meant the process was slow (up to 48 hours to collect data), prone to mistakes (no single version of the truth), and not able to support business information requirements. This lack of real-time visibility was impeding the pace of innovation and customer responsiveness.

Solution | Improving business efficiency and customer experience through a data lake

After identifying the key business areas and decision insights required by client’s business finance teams, SkillNet created a data lake as the single source of truth by integrating data from multiple source technologies such as stores, audited sales, online sales and inventory. Using Oracle’s Business Intelligence platform, SkillNet automated data collation and report generation.

Hundreds of manual spreadsheets were replaced by automated reports that were run hourly, daily and weekly. Business users now have the ability to create near real-time visually impactful reports with self-service tools.

The solution enabled retailer’s team to gain visibility and proactive actionable insights across store systems and various lines of business.

Benefits | Making Better Decisions with real-time data

• Availability of near-real-time (as compared to 2 or more days earlier) integrated data with automated reports
  • This has considerably reduced business decision cycles
  • Proactive decision making due to the business teams’ ability to generate user-friendly reports with near real-time data
  • Near real-time hierarchical store dashboards (Region, area, Store) and KPI reports on sales, ACT, conversion, engagement and loyalty participation

• Dashboards with deeper data insights have helped the client’s business & store teams uncover newer insights
  • More informed decisions regarding inventory, discounts, shrinkage, product scan data and channel resulting in better responses to customer requirements.
  • Teams are being able to view sales data in near real-time and be more effective in their stock allocation and replenishment
  • Reduction in thefts and shrinkage

• Regional Managers were spending ~15hrs per week on analysing and customizing reports. They now spend time with Area Managers and Store Managers to drive store performance