Retailers, much like any corporation, are “knowledge” businesses, relying on information intelligence to optimize operational processes, business strategies, financial performance, supply chain optimization, effective merchandising, market awareness, competitive positioning, and customer loyalty. Knowledge based IT solutions abound in ever increasing numbers within the larger retailers; each delivering value in its own right and contributing to an overwhelming array of information assets. Optimizing the “merchandising intelligence value” within these assets is a challenge made more difficult by increased information complexity compounded by the volatility of data volume and change rate dynamics.
For intelligence to have real value it must be derived from data that is always accurate and always current in its content. With the information assets inventory generally created by differing applications, generating differing data bases/files of differing data types, ensuring timely and accurate intelligence in support of operational initiatives is the single greatest obstacle to a retailer’s success.
MerchandiseIQ™ (MIQ) addresses this challenge, providing a variation on Extract, Transform and Load technology expressly designed to improve merchandising through improved information management productivity, and the elimination of IT bottlenecks caused by the ever present need to develop data pre-processing routines in response to the dynamics of merchandising and the information it requires.
MIQ differs from traditional ETL at the point of implementation “set-up”, where the users define the data sources to be accessed, the type of manipulation to be applied to the data elements as they are extracted, and the data feeds, (there may be multiple), used by MIQ to deliver the relevant-to-purpose intelligence to those merchandising environments dependent upon immediate, and accurate information. Once set-up, MIQ automatically executes in response to those applications requiring the intelligence MIQ is delivering.
Baseline Information Management for all Purposes
MIQ is designed to be embedded as “the” information management component within a range of retail solutions. As an example of its baseline data management, MIQ can be applied to optimize mark-downs after promotions. In too many cases, retailers simply look at overall inventory levels and take the decision to apply a blanket “one size fits all” mark-down in all stores. MIQ can search the various data files involved to establish store sell through and inventory measurements and generate the decisions on (a) whether a mark-down is required at all, and (b) if so, then make the decision what percentage mark-down is applied. This provides an inexpensive way to create store differentiated mark-downs.
Managing Merchandising Content for Sign and Tag Production
MIQ is also the platform for automating the provisioning of merchandising content for sign and shelf tag production. A task every retailer executes every day. What is missing, however, is the ability to integrate affinity analyses that enable cross-sell and up-sell recommendations to be applied to shelf tags produced for products offered at discounts. With 30% of all products offered at discounts all the time, the opportunity to use cross and up sell recommendations to recover revenue and margins is lost; unless you have the ability to automate the retrieval of the affinity analyses recommendations and auto-populate these into the content for print production. With demand pricing and the consequent high volume print runs, there has been a significant shift to outsourced print production of shelf tags. Their production cycles prohibit any ability for IT to develop extraction routines, which removes access to a proven mechanism for increasing overall financial performance.
Expanding the Role of In-Store Kiosks
MIQ achieves this by functioning as the mechanism automating the real-time interaction between the in-store kiosks and the back-office systems intelligence personalized to the customer interacting with the kiosk.
By applying MIQ to access customer loyalty data, recent buying patterns, and any other profile data maintained for that customer, the kiosk interaction with the customer can now include “relevant” suggestive selling data (cross and up sell), health and wellness guidance based on registered profiles, and any other personalized data that makes that specific customer feel his/her needs and preferences are being truly addressed by the retailer. This matches the ability of on-line retailers who apply technology to “market to a market of one”; something the brick and mortar retailers have long sought, but found almost impossible to achieve. This is a kiosk application that embodies truly personalized customer-centric merchandising that is a dimension beyond the simple ability to apply vendor promotion details appropriate to a store demographic.
MIQ and Near Field Communications
In Europe, where Near Field Communications (NFC) technology is being applied in a number of industry segments for a variety of purposes, it is evident that enabling transactional and enquiry interactions using NFC enabled cell phones will gain significant momentum in the next two to three years. In those situations where the interactions require back-office systems intelligence to be retrieved and applied in support of these NFC – cell phone transactions, the automated information management capabilities of MIQ will be in demand. Being able to drive personalized responses to users of NFC based technologies will be a critical piece within a number of industry segment solutions.
The Power and Flexibility of MIQ
Access to intelligence within the existing information assets may be in response to an event, some other application, trigger, a pre-defined change in an existing data state, in accordance with a user defined schedule, or as a result of the execution of a business rule for extraction and delivery. MIQ’s flexibility matches the operational flexibility demanded by retailers.
MIQ’s powerful transformation capabilities are found within its rules engine, which employs a natural language “business user” rules definition paradigm in addition to its ability to create rules using scripting. The rules engine is the foundation of the “transformation” functionality of MIQ as a productivity solution.
The automated real-time capability for accessing multiple different database and file types, and exposing user defined data elements to the transformation function, makes MIQ the most advanced productivity tool for retail merchandising; one that largely eliminates the need to impact IT resources.
Enhanced Productivity through Automated Data Management
MIQ’s rules engine includes predefined, powerful, and proven capabilities; both in terms of execution speed and scalability of data sources, data sets, or rules sets. The business user just defines the conditions to be applied within the rules using the MIQ business rules editor. This is designed as an easy “point and click” user interface for easy definition and editing of complex rules steps. Set the rules correctly, and the execution to specification is immediately automated.
Need to target a new data source? Just use MIQ’s UI to define the data source, data model and required data elements, and access/extraction is automatic. Need to create a new rule? Just look up the closest existing rule and apply a simple edit to change this into a new, repurposed, rule that can be saved into the rules library for execution and future editing. These types of edit steps are UI based with no code development required and can be accomplished in minutes, rather than months.
Rules can be defined to address the most complex decision trees; and automate both the manipulation of existing data, as well as the creation of new data elements derived from the rules logic. Rules execution within MIQ is always accurate, as it is always applied to ‘live’ application data sourced from the actual applications managing that data.
