Retail

Live Event: International Institute for Analytics Executive Symposium

May 24, 2012

[ June 27, 2012; ] I will be participating in the Analytics Executive Symposium being run on June 26th in Chicago by the International Institute for Analytics of which I am a faculty member.
The Analytics Executive Symposium is a unique and professional gathering of analytics champions who come together to hear and discuss the latest findings and research in analytics. The Symposium [...]

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Here’s how to use Decision Management to improve cross-channel experience

August 29, 2011

Retailing today had an interesting article – “Best Buy, Sears, Target tops in cross-channel performance” – about the importance and challenges of becoming a cross-channel retailer. I was struck by the potential of Decision Management Systems to improve cross-channel experiences in a couple of key areas:

60% had inconsistency across in-store and online promotions;
Obviously inconsistency is [...]

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First Look – Clario Core

July 26, 2011

Clario Analytics has been marketing cloud-based analytic solutions since 2008. The company has been going to market with a general purpose analytic platform – Clario Platform, offering predictive analytic model development in the cloud – across multiple verticals. In addition, they leveraged their deep experience in marketing optimization and developed Clario Stream, a marketing optimization [...]

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First Look – Silvertail Systems

July 19, 2011

Silver Tail Systems was founded in 2008 by founders with a background in web search, trend analytics and fraud detection. After joining eBay to fight phishing and other kinds of fraud like fake auctions and fake bids, the team sat down and figured out the tools that would have been helpful tackling these fraud challenges. [...]

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Smarter Customer Analytics and Decision Management with IBM

June 2, 2011

We got a quick overview of SPSS Decision Management (see my post on SPSS DM 6 or indeed the whole blog for my view of this). SPSS Decision Management combines predictive analytics, business rules and optimization/simulation to optimize high volume decisions like “should I search this car at the border” or “should I investigate this [...]

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IBM’s Big Data Platform and Decision Management

May 24, 2011

IBM has recently announced a new strategy for bringing Big Data to the enterprise. In particular this includes InfoSphere Streams v2 (announced April 12) and InfoSphere BigInsights 1.1 announced today. Big Data is an issue, of course, largely because the amount of data available to organizations is growing rapidly. Surveys show that many managers already [...]

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Transforming your business with analytics – a series

May 23, 2011

I want to share with you the collective wisdom of over 50 companies that have transformed their business using analytics. These companies tackled core business issues like customer retention, marketing, patient care, student achievement, and customer centricity in industries as varied as Retail, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Education, Government, Insurance and Banking.
Tomorrow I will kick off a [...]

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First Look – G Stat

April 21, 2011

G-Stat is a privately held Israeli company focused on advanced analytical and data mining solutions. The founder of G-Stat began his career as an econometrician, focusing on large time-series data initially. Then he worked at the Bank of Israel in IT helping translate what the economists and others needed into information systems. He rapidly became [...]

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First Look – Activant DynaChange rules

April 13, 2011

I saw an interesting press announcement the other day about Activant’s new business rules functionality. Activant (who recently agreed to be acquired and merged with Epicor) is an ERP provider focused on distribution and retail – 60% of revenues come from retail and 40% from distribution. Activant as a whole has 15,000 customers concentrated in [...]

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First Look – Kount

March 8, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Kount recently, a 4 year old company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Keynetics (a 13 year old e-commerce company) focused on preventing fraud in e-commerce. They offer an all-in-one SaaS solution aimed at detecting fraud fast (intra-transaction real-time) while giving customers flexibility and usability. They [...]

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SAS product portfolio and roadmaps

March 7, 2011

Warning, long post follows – SAS has a lot of products and even this summary was a lot. A big session on the product portfolio – 2010 and 2011 highlights in some specific focus areas. New releases in 2010 included:

Customer Link Analytics – released in Q1 this product focused on using links between customers to [...]

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SAS Vertical Strategy

March 7, 2011

Focus of the presentation from Russ Cobb was Banking, Insurance, Retail and Government.
Banking first. Lots of releases this year primarily around Enterprise Risk Management, Governance Risk Compliance, Customer intelligence, fraud and financial crime solutions. Key customer issues for SAS in banking:

Customer Growth
How do you identify, grow and manage your most profitable customers. Big focus for [...]

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SAS Sales and Marketing Overview

March 7, 2011

Carl Farrell came up to talk about sales enablement and execution. 2010 was an interesting year in the Americas as the recovery was very inconsistent between countries in the Americas and across verticals. Strong growth in First Year Fees – 21% in US, 15% in Canada and 56% nearly in Latin America (with the Southern [...]

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SAS Inside Intelligence 2011 – Executive Viewpoioint

March 7, 2011

I am attending the SAS analyst day this week – SAS Inside Intelligence.
Jim Goodnight kicked off the SAS analyst event. Numbers look good for a tough economy – 5.2% worldwide growth in US Dollars or 6.7% without currency fluctuation. Latin America, Canada and Asia Pacific were all very strong but regions were good across the [...]

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Analytics and the art of selling

November 23, 2010

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

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First Look – Runa

October 12, 2010

Runa was founded a couple of years ago to solve the problem of very low conversion rates on most e-commerce websites. Companies spend lots of money driving people to their websites but only 2-3% convert to buyers. One of the biggest reasons for this is shopping cart abandonment – people put goods in their cart [...]

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Teradata – Coca Cola and customer intelligence

April 27, 2010

Justin Honaman from Coca Cola presented on their use of Teradata in their customer intelligence program.  Coca Cola has a huge range of products, in many sizes, as well as dozens of bottlers and distribution partners. The 72 bottlers are limited to specific geographies, adding a layer of complexity to their business. Justin’s group, Customer [...]

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Teradata – National Australia Bank and next best action

April 27, 2010

National Australia Bank group (a 15 year Teradata customer) presented on their use of Teradata for multi-channel marketing. NAB has 10.9M customers worldwide and about 38,000 staff. Brock Lynch, from the marketing group within the retail bank, gave an overview of their analytical CRM approach. NAB sees its analytical CRM assets as:

Complete customer data stored [...]

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Guest intelligence at Target

April 12, 2010

Guest intelligence is something Target use to drive marketing and merchandising decisions. Target, of course, is a large US retailer that does business in 49 states and has a major web presence. Target has guest data from panel surveys,  store surveys and operational data and regards these all as valid sources of guest data, without [...]

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Zappos (and others) and business analytics

April 1, 2010

Meri Gruber had an interesting post on her Competing on Execution blog this week – Zappos: Make Me Happier with Business Analytics – that prompted me to want to add my own thoughts. She says:
Why is Zappos only offering me help from other customers, when they are sitting on a wealth of order (and [...]

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