Mobile Devices, Mobile Apps: The Bookends Of BI
December 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers
By Matt Pillar, editor in chief
In the simplest terms, retail business intelligence is the collection, processing, and organization of information in a way that promises a return on the data capture investment. It’s a systems and discipline-agnostic, data-driven approach to improving a wide range of operations, from loss prevention to customer management. And it’s fast becoming dependent on a mobile infrastructure. In fact, mobile devices and applications are the bookends of modern retail BI; they play an increasingly important role in gathering the raw data that feeds analytics engines and an equally important role in spitting out value on the execution side of the equation.
The growing multidisciplinary role of mobile retail technology is evident in this year’s Integrated Solutions For Retailers tech spending forecast, which starts on page 8 of this issue. Our research paints a clear picture of heavy mobile device and application investment among line-of-business stakeholders, and it’s a trend that’s backed up by a couple of recent reports from Retail Systems Research.
In its Fall 2012 report Marketing in Retail: Making the Case for the CMO, RSR found that the top three most valued marketing technologies reported by survey respondents were customer purchase analytics, CRM, and marketing operations planning. It also asked how retailers were feeding these systems with the customer demographic, behavioral, and sentiment data that makes them work. Retailers said that in-store devices (mobile, kiosk, POS) were second only to email for collecting this information, which informs the foundational elements of their marketing campaigns.
I’d like to see a breakout of which of these in-store devices account for what amount of collected data. The POS would most assuredly lead given its ubiquity. But everyone has a POS. How much more data could you collect, how much more efficiently, and how much more competitive would it make you if multifunction mobile devices were deployed on the front end of your customer centricity efforts?
On the flip side of BI, where retailers execute on the data, RSR’s new report Retail Business Intelligence: A Work in Progress tells us that 35% of retailers are budgeting to give their employees mobile access to BI tools and analysis.
When asked what they perceive as their top operational opportunities for BI, 61% of RSR’s “winning” retailers said exception management and alerts, the same percentage said “what-if modeling,” and 57% said better real-time analytics. While what-if modeling is still largely a head-office undertaking, what are quick response to exception management and alerts without mobile devices and applications? And, what’s the value of real-time analytics if mobility isn’t enabling real-time store-level execution on the analysis?
According to this most recent research from RSR, only 7% of retailers have already deployed mobile access to analytics enterprisewide, 41% have deployed mobile access to analytics in specific departments, and everyone else either hasn’t done it or doesn’t know if they’ve done it. That’s a breakdown at the execution level. Those retailers who are planning to fill the gap between mobile data collection and mobile execution on intelligence will reap massive rewards.