Site selections have always been high-risk decisions for retailers, primarily because it's a process that's traditionally been made by separate divisions using disparate data from isolated corporate silos, third-party data maintained in static spreadsheets, and very limited mapping and reporting tools. In today's weak economy, that patchwork process is no longer up to the task of mitigating real estate risk or gaining market share. The stakes are too high, and there's just no room for error.
In a recent Chain Store Age article, Alteryx CEO Dean Stoecker examines how to eliminate silo bottlenecks, stale & static spreadsheet data, and slow analysis & reporting. The early adopters of geographic business intelligence are doing all that now, and it's changing the game for retailers.
With the advent of cloud computing, the real-time integration of spatial- and non-spatial data combined with on-demand analytics and rich reporting is pushing BI-based insights down to the level of individual stores, departments and product categories.
For example, Alteryx technology gives LOB managers the tools they've always lacked to process point-of-sale (POS) data, to drive their real estate site selection and forecasting models. And for the first time, they can also include other critical and previously 'inaccessible' data on urban storefronts, shopping centers, end-caps or pads, free-standing buildings, parking, view corridors and zoning laws.
The result? Store performance goes up, RE risk goes down, and the early adopters of geographic business intelligence move to the head of the pack...
