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•White Paper: Harvesting The Market Basket

By 1010data, Inc

The introduction of the barcode scanner ushered in an era of metrics-based decision making for retailers. It was the first data analysis revolution in retail – providing a complete and reliable source of objective sales data. Since then, the POS T-log (transaction log) has been heralded as a "goldmine" of information, but in truth, it's not been systematically tapped into.

Traditional approaches to data warehousing and business intelligence have generally been adequately successful in meeting the needs of SKU-by-store level analysis for most retailers. Data collected from POS systems today is usually summarized and then loaded into a data warehouse. Most of us are familiar with the software and hardware technologies that have been used over the years to produce dashboards and reports to facilitate decision making using this level of data. It has been a relatively good thing, although expensive and cumbersome for most retailers. The challenge now is that the solution has not gone far enough nor fast enough for the ever data-hungry user.

However, Market Basket Analysis is often interpreted more broadly to refer to the analysis of detailed "transactional" data, or data at the "atomic" level. Such datasets would include the most granular level of data – the "line item detail" – the contents of every basket. Hence the term "Market Basket" data since the presence of such data is what most visibly sets this kind of system apart. But according to this definition, the focus is not only on the interactions of items within the basket. Rather, it is the effort to understand all of the characteristics of a retailer's operation that are impossible to be gleaned from summarized data, or is not commonly found in systems that store just summarized data.

Click Here To Download:
•White Paper: Harvesting The Market Basket