Retail Systems
Retail Systems refer to the set of operational and analytical applications implemented by organizations in the Retail sector, as well as other sectors with a retail component. The operational component of retail systems includes the point-of-sale (POS) systems, the customer information systems, and the customer service applications that all retailers have in place. The analytic component of retail systems includes the reporting, scorecarding, dashboarding, trending, and forecasting applications that make the operational systems useful to an organization.
Retail Systems and Business Intelligence
As two-thirds of Fortune’s Global 500 Retailers have shown, Retail Systems built with business intelligence tools and analytics from MicroStrategy enable an organization to achieve the efficiencies and process improvements they need for success. The most successful retail organizations have built retail systems and applications in many areas, specifically including the following:
- Sales and Inventory Analysis—Analysis of sales and inventory data allows retailers to improve purchasing and product management to increase revenue and customer satisfaction.
- Store Operations Analysis—Analysis of store operational data allows retailers to optimize the location, product mix, and productivity metrics within a store.
- Customer Analysis—Retailers analyze and report on customer information in order to attract new customers and grow the customers they already have.
- Promotions Analysis—By analyzing historical and customer data, retailers can determine which products to include in future promotions and when to promote them.
- Supply Chain and Channel Analysis—Analyzing the channels a customer uses for purchasing, as well as the vendors involved in those channels, allows a retailer to optimize the supply chain.
MicroStrategy is the best Business Intelligence platform for Retail Systems
Many of the unique strengths of the MicroStrategy platform are well suited for performing the most demanding of analyses required by Retail Systems. The amount of data generated by retailers is extremely large, due in part to the high numbers of products in inventory and extremely large numbers of unique daily transactions. MicroStrategy’s ability to handle the largest data sets from transactional systems allows retailers to get the most from their Retail Systems. In addition, the high number of retail, wholesale, and department store locations that make up most retail companies greatly increases the number of internal users and number of retail system reports. Providing store managers, franchisees, and corporate management with the same access to functionality, and personalized access to their data, improves effectiveness and lessens redundancy.