Retail Execution Data Hub: A Central Data Platform: 12-Wk Implementation

CPG enterprises are focussed on strong retail execution, to stand out on the shelf. Brands struggle to execute at retail and as a result experience lost opportunities and less sales. Real time insights on sales, customer satisfaction and promotion performance enable sales team to delivered tailored recommendation to retailers. Legacy data stores and non intuitive dashboards act as a hindrance. Also integrating the disparate data sources pose a challenge. The following factors are to be considered:

1. Complex retail landscape
2. Limited influence on in-store execution
3. Intense competition for visibility
4. Fragmented retail data and lack of quality data governance
5. Inability to measure retail execution in a timely manner and to take immediate action

Also highlighting the challenges faced for processing the huge volume of data:

1. Legacy data stores involve multiple data sources and have unclean data and inconsistent hierarchies
2. Dashboards are hard to comprehend and suffer from slow loading. Multiple dashboards(different granularity and timeframes) have to be maintained for retail sales and supply chain metrics
3. Data privacy measures are not in place, leading to unauthorized information release
4. Inconsistent data refreshes and lack of validation also leadsto data gaps

Sigmoid has built a Retail Execution Data Hub, functioning as a single source of truth by integrating data sources across retailers, syndicate data providers, furnishing data at the most granular level - by week, by product, by store. The unified data hub also meets the needs of different personas, providing summary views for leadership and detailed analysis for retail sales team. Intuitive dashboards enable actionable insights and quick decision making. The fast loading dashboards with data privacy protocols enable organizations to analyse till the store level. Multiple areas of retail execution such on-shelf availability, sales, Day 1 readiness , lost sales, etc. can be visualized by store, category and region. Some of the curated views provided (can be customized):

a. Promotional Activity Audit b. Retail Sales and Budget c. OSA Detail d. Inventory Visibility e. Planned vs Order vs Shipped f. Retail ASM Time Study... and many more

Benefits ensured:

1. Greater data accessibility
2. User friendly interactive visualizations
3. Inherent data governance across the stages for transformation
4. Actionable insights leading to effective business decisions

The following Azure workloads have been used in developing the above mentioned solution:

1. Azure Data Factory (ADF) for orchestrating data integration pipelines to integrate data from diverse sources
2. Azure Data Lake Storage, serving as the underlying storage layer
3. Microsoft Purview for a Unified Data Governance
4. Integrating and analysing large data sets
5. Power BI for Business Intelligence