CPGs have had access to Point of Sale (POS) data now for many years and many of them use a Demand Signal Repository (DSR) to gather, clean and report on this data. (Actually most of them use a number of DSR's and even when they do have just one, still can't handle truly cross-retailer analytics).
I've been involved with a number of these systems as a software-buyer, a system-administrator, consultant and most recently, leading the analytic development at Orchestro.
There are some excellent tools available and, in their current form, they can help you drive both additional revenue and reduced costs when used well. However, in my experience many of these tools have been sold in under the guise of "saving time" through reporting automation. That's valuable, but it's not "finding a new sales opportunity" valuable.
I think we are still in the infancy of DSR development: systems are operating at the limits of the technology they were built on and necessary trade-offs mean that being good at one thing (e.g. speed) makes it more challenging to be good at others (e.g. analytics).
The next generation of DSR can be dramatically more effective. In particular, it will be:
Business Analytics and Predictive Modeling for CPG/Retail
Back to blogging on "Better Business Analytics"
It's been quite a while, just over 12 months in fact since my last blog post. In that time, I've been hard at work developing analytic applications for the Orchestro DSR. (Orchestro's off-shelf alerting tool is especially cool and something I am very proud of contributing to). I enjoyed my time at Orchestro, they're a good team and have big plans, but one key thing I found out about myself is that I prefer working real-life problems to developing software for someone else to have all the fun :-)
So, I'm now back full-time on consulting and I will occasionally blog on topics of interest to me. Expect to see more soon on:
So, I'm now back full-time on consulting and I will occasionally blog on topics of interest to me. Expect to see more soon on:
- Next-generations DSRs (Demand Signal Repositories)
- Retail supply-chain analytics
- Handling (BIG-ish) data for analytics
- The right tools for the job (Predictive Analytics, Business Models, Optimization)
- Some more thoughts on store-clustering
- Inventory modeling at retail (and why it's different, again)
- Order forecasting using POS data
- Further thoughts on SNAP and other ignored demand drivers
- and if there is something you would like to hear more on ... just drop me a line.
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