Retail

Analytics Services

Analytics for Improving Markdown Optimization

We measured and analysed performance of markdown  for large retailers in USA involving thousands of store – item combinations.

A weekly service in accordance with well established  cadence,  involved measuring:

  • Gross margin
  • Sales growth
  • Sell-through
  • Rate of sales

and a number of KPIs and identification of outlier items requiring special treatment for forecasting ‘lift’ response to markdown recommendations.

The service was provided to a consulting company which developed the algorithms for optimizing profitability through markdown recommendations. Based on our ‘deep-dive’ analysis,  algorithms were improved to deal with ‘non-conforming’ store-items.

We made significant  contribution to improving the main algorithm.

Analytics for Recommending Weekly Buy Plan 

We provide a weekly service for recommending   store-item purchase of  high  fashion expesive watches for a client in India having more than 80 stores, 15 brands and thousands of items  with a variety of attributes such as dial size, color,  mechanism, strap, diamond studding and so on.

An interesting challenge that we have addressed during algorithm development is small number of data points for most of the store-item combinations.

In collaboration with our consulting partner, a domain expert, we have built a  cloud platform which displays:

  • Past sales  trend at various levels – store, item, item-cluster
  • Buying potential considering available funds and inventory levels
  • Optimum buying plan that uses the buying potential with a view to minimise ‘stock cover’ a measure of inventory  level.
  • Supporting reports that explain the rationale of buy plan recommendation.

The service is expected to improve stock turnover through more ‘intelligent’ buying and stock transfers across stores, apart from improvement in sales due to better availability.  The  improvement in  inventory turnover will significantly improve Return on Investment.

Analytics for Recommending Seasonal Buy Plan

This is a service under trial with a large Indian retailer for one of their 20 brands.

In collaboration with our consulting partner, a domain expert, we have built a  cloud platform which displays:

  • Past sales  and other KPI trends at various levels – store, item, item-cluster
  • Compute sales rate adjusted by availability factor
  • Optimum buying plan based on a number of parameters  such as: product ranks assigned by merchandisers,  sales forecasts generated by us, available financial budget and so on
  • Supporting reports that explain the rationale of buy plan recommendation

The recommended buy plan is expected to improve:|

  • Product availability at stores in terms of spread of colors and sizes for every style
  • Sell-through  for every SKU during ‘in-season’
  • Reduction in ‘end-of-season’  discounts.

Consequently it will improve gross margin significantly.

Analytical Reporting

We are providing Analytical Reporting  services to a large number of business users through our BA platforms.

Across few clients, including one of the largest  petroleum companies in India and a few fashion retailers in India, more than 500 business users are empowered with  Analytical Reports.

Comparable to some of the branded solutions, ours is a service that provides access to hundreds of users with ‘pivoting’ capability over the Internet,  replacing traditional methods of  downloading data in Excel for analysis.

Business users get to work with ‘live’ reports and graphs with slice-dice and drill-down functionality  while power users can make more reports to enrich  repositories.

Our service pricing  model is unique. .

Unlike models offered by others which permit few licenses for a centralized reporting  team for generating and publishing  ‘passive’ reports, we enable use of ‘active’ and ‘ad-hoc’ reporting for a large number of  business users  for answering  their questions instantly.

For a large team of users, our service would typically cost  under $10 per user per month including infrastructure use and support.