How a Collaborative Analytics Platform Can Improve Business Reviews

Collaborative analytics platforms can give businesses the tools to collect, share, and understand data regarding retailer sales performance, inventory management, consumer behavior, and more. A collaborative platform provides reports that combine and aggregate multiple data streams in a way that is easy to understand and most importantly, actionable.

A great analytics platform is one that is robust, flexible, and customizable so it can provide the right tools in order for you to understand your specific business. Most businesses use some form of Key Performance Metric (KPI) management in order to measure their progress towards their goals. Why not have a tool that is detailed enough to measure your own specific KPIs, but also expansive enough to help you discover entirely new KPIs that you never knew existed?

A collaborative analytics platform not only gives you quality information relevant to your business but can also provide valuable information to your supply chain and distribution partners.

SEE ALSO: 3 Benefits Of Having An Unbiased View Of Your Retail Data

Tools to Understand Reviews

Graphical interfaces are essential for reviewing your business processes. While the individual data and its relationships are important, an effective review process requires fast access to the data in an easy to understand format. People are visually focused in the way we process information, and your data analytics system has to meet you in your visual processing. 

Which direction are sales going?  How has this changed over time? While mathematical analysis will give you precise answers to these questions, graphical representations show it more efficiently. With one look at a graph, you can see whether sales are going up, down, or fluctuating. The difference between a good and a great platform though is the ability to do this heavy lifting for you. A great platform will not only give you the raw data but will also generate a graph or chart of that data so that you don't have to spend time creating one yourself.  Whether you are a person who is less data inclined or you are someone who just doesn't have the time to mess around in spreadsheets creating graphs, the time and energy saved here will be valuable to you and your team.

Set KPIs For Business Standards

You need to be able to set and review KPIs for your organization. This is essential for understanding where your business is at versus where you want it to be in the future. A collaborative analytics platform will provide the tools to look at KPIs for various time frames and standards. It will also allow you to discover and customize new KPIs that measure the performance of your business in greater detail. Whether your KPIs are based on top line revenue and unit trends or require more advanced metrics such as penetration or promotional lift, an effective analytics platform will provide the flexibility to easily track and explore the different ways of measuring performance in your business.

SEE ALSO: How To Gain Visibility to the Direct Store Delivery Supply Chain

Understanding Relationships With Suppliers

Collaborative analytics are relational. For retailers, suppliers, and distributors, integrating information across the business life cycle is important. Collaborative analytics show whether price discrepancies are happening at various stages in the distribution system, where inventory is moving, and when the product reaches the final stage of distribution at the POS. 

Analytics can reduce issues in communication between businesses and increase the capability for collaborative marketing activities. If you cannot track the cost, revenue, in-stock percentage, or other trends, you lose the capability to determine ROI in your inventory. 

For example, if you launch a new item, one of your KPIs will certainly pertain to the execution of stores putting that new item on the shelf. A collaborative solution will be able to track the execution of your new item launch by store over time, allowing you to narrow in on gaps caused by insufficient inventory or incorrect POG execution. Having the ability to identify issues like these throughout the supply chain will maximize profitability and ensure nothing slips through the cracks and grows into a bigger problem for your business.

SEE ALSO: 5 Signs You Should Invest In Retail Analytics

Understanding Competition

Knowing how your business compares to the competition is vital for future decision making . Do you have this information at the click of a button or the touch of a finger? One of the most useful parts of a great analytics platform is the auto-updating of this information in real time. Not only do you have visual access to the trends in your business, you have access to see how those trends are stacking up against your competitors.

For example, let's say you discover that your business had a small increase in sales of .01% this quarter. This may be discouraging if you were expecting significant growth. But upon further review you notice that multiple competing brands had negative sales growth rates in the quarter. This likely changes your viewpoint in a positive way as you can now see that your business grew while your competition declined.

This type of information gives you tools to plan a proper path going forward. Rather than looking at your internal systems, you will return to marketing strategies, like finding new product or new marketing venues to continue to outperform the competition.

A great, collaborative, analytics platform gives you the information necessary to manage your business well. 

To learn more about key analytics reports, presented side-by-side with actual case studies demonstrating how each report or dashboard was utilized in real, actionable ways to generate improvements in sales, and profits for both the retailer and supplier, click here.