The Retail Industry’s Unique Data Challenges

Retailers are struggling in today’s tough economic environment. You’re competing for far fewer customers. You need to make sure that every dollar or euro spent on marketing delivers real, measurable results. But how can your company do so when it is grappling with challenges that stem from data—its massive volume, complexity, questionable quality, and many sources?

Companies in the retail industry need to be able to access, integrate, and trust their information assets so they can increase operational efficiency, better comply with industry standards and government regulations, and optimize their sales channels to compete more effectively.

Increase Operational Efficiency

Threatened by shrinking profit margins, your retail company must maximize efficiency throughout your supply chain. You may be exploring price optimization, inventory allocation, intelligent merchandising, and automating store-level replenishment. Or you may be streamlining your supply chain by implementing electronic product code/radio frequency identification (EPC/RFID) or global data synchronization (GDS) or by strengthening your global trading partnerships.

But such initiatives generate enormous volumes of complex data, which enters your operational and financial systems in different formats, with multiple definitions and varying degrees of quality. How does your retail company obtain a single, clean, consistent, integrated view of your business operations? How can you create a seamless, uninterrupted link from manufacturer to point of sale? How can you integrate and synchronize data from disparate sources—including external data from global trading partners—to optimize inventory levels and make other key business decisions that drive profits?

Informatica can help.

Better Manage Compliance

Your retail company is wrestling with new industry standards, such as global trade identification numbers implemented by the Uniform Code Council. Your company is scanning and processing new symbols in addition to the traditional universal product code (UPC) bar codes at the point of sale. But the vast amounts of data collected by multiple systems make it difficult to get the right information at the right time.

How does your company accurately track even more datatypes with multiple data formats across disparate systems? And how does it comply with government regulations that make corporate governance a top priority? How do you pull consistent, reliable, auditable data from diverse sources to simplify regulatory compliance and provide accurate financial reports?

Informatica can help.

Optimize Sales Channels

To maximize profitability, your retail company must better understand how customers access and use different sales channels. You need to provide a consistent, differentiated experience for customers across all channels and increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Reducing operating costs and maximizing profit in each channel requires a real-time view of all enterprise data—including information generated by RFID, point-of-sale (POS) software, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications—and synchronization of that data.

How does your company integrate all types of data—such as customer information, forecasting inventory, order and inventory management, and transactional data—from multiple sources? How can you be sure that data is correct, consistent, and reusable across multiple channels? How can you deliver that data as needed to make strategic business decisions?

Informatica can help.