Here’s a question that needs answering: how do you make smart decisions around your retail business? Also, what can you do to ensure you meet the needs of your customers head-on? Fortunately, the answer to both questions is the same: you analyse your data. And when doing so - when evaluating any retail data - specialised business intelligence services shouldn’t be far behind.
That’s where DotActiv’s Retail Business Intelligence services can help you. DotActiv’s consultants have deep technical expertise and industry knowledge. We utilise our expertise in combination with our powerful software and proven methodology to deliver our Retail Business Intelligence services, uncovering objective and insightful answers to critical category management-related questions.
What is business intelligence?
Before we unpack how DotActiv can deliver business intelligence services to you, it’s critical first to understand business intelligence for what it is.
IT research and advisory company, Gartner, is a good source for that purpose.
The group defines business intelligence as “an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimise decisions and performance”.
In the context of retail, that includes various technology-driven processes that allow you to analyse your data and extract meaningful information to assist and inform future decisions.
That, in itself, should be enough to explain why it’s so critical to your business. Without uncovering these insights, you are likely to make decisions based on subjectivity rather than objectivity, which is a problem best avoided.
That said, there is another reason why business intelligence and the services delivered are so critical.
It’s because of this simple fact: as you gather more data around your business, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sense of it all. Besides the volume of data that you need to sift through to gather meaningful insights, there is also the complexities involved in understanding it. That takes time.
Then there is the point that you face external pressure from your competitors in the market. One false move or bad decision can set you back.
What can you expect from DotActiv’s Retail Business Intelligence Services?
While DotActiv is known primarily for its category management software, it would be disingenuous to discount the services side of the business.
Why? Firstly, uncovering insights within data from multiple data sources is core to category management. Secondly, because DotActiv is fundamentally focussed on category management, our business intelligence services will naturally reveal deep insights regarding the various aspects of category management.
That includes assortments, space planning, inventory planning, retail execution and compliance and other related retail functions.
Thirdly, DotActiv has recently shifted its business focus. DotActiv is a Services-first company, powered by leading software, proprietary processes and talented people. It’s worth pointing out that we always were a Service-first company. Nothing has changed in us declaring that. We just never placed enough emphasis on the point that Software and Services go hand-in-hand.
1. What to expect when choosing DotActiv’s Retail BI Services
If you’re looking for objective and insightful answers to the most important questions you have about your business, then it’s worth considering investing in retail business intelligence services.
But why DotActiv specifically? And what can you expect?
Let's consider the software side of our business. As already noted, we underpin our category management services with our powerful software. It's the same when it comes to offering business intelligence services. In this case, we use the capabilities found in our retail analytics software.
For example; you may want to know the overall sales of the various sub-categories, segments and sub-segments of one of your categories and compare them to each other over a specific period. Or, you want to see how many units are sold for that category.
Having established the questions you want us to answer, our consultants can get to work.
In doing so, they'll consider a variety of interactive and visual analytics to build a dashboard that answers these questions. And not just at a surface level.
We can dive into your data to look at it at a granular level if you need us to.
In the case of the above two questions, a good option is to use a drill-down pie chart (interactive chart), which can allow us to see the performance of each level of your category. With that information at hand, you can begin making decisions around the future of your category.
Of course, the pie chart is just one data visualisation of many available to you. The data visualisations that you would like us to use depend on what you want us to analyse.
2. Why Choose DotActiv's Retail Business Intelligence Services
Uncovering objective and insightful answers to critical category management-related questions require more than just access to the software. Or only to expertise.
Instead, if you want relevant answers that can help you to achieve your category management goals, it requires a mix of expertise, software and a proven methodology. All of which DotActiv provides.
But what makes up this critical mix? We unpack the eight core elements. It’s worth noting that even if we are missing one of the below aspects, regardless of which one, DotActiv will not be able to deliver its category management-focused business intelligence services efficiently.
- Talented People
DotActiv employs only the best category management talent available. Thanks to our partnerships with local universities and internal headhunting sources, DotActiv employs only the most qualified and talented people. We also train each employee internally on our leading software.
- Deep Expertise
Our global customer base and education investments have enabled us to form deep expertise on how to achieve category performance quickly and efficiently. Whether you are looking to deploy category management for the first time or you need support with a new initiative, our expertise will add significant value to your business.
- Tried and tested methodologies
Even the best ideas backed by the smartest minds and technology turn to chaos without a defined methodology. Our tried and tested methodologies bring clarity and simplicity to category management resulting in consistent outputs that deliver results.
- Powerful proprietary software
Our proprietary all-in-one category management software allows our consultants to deliver exceptional results. That is because our software considers the interdependent nature of category management. What’s more, everything we deliver is data-driven.
- Strategic, tactical and transactional services
We deploy the right mix of strategic, tactical and transactional services so that we can go beyond strategy and insights to actually get the job done every time on time. This unique approach to category management services helps us to deliver meaningful results in record time and more importantly to act as true partners to our clients.
- Results centred service with clear ROI
All of our category optimisation services are guided by clear objectives which remain front and centre throughout the process. Achievement of objectives is continually measured to ensure that we refine strategies and tactics and that the return on investment is clearly understood.
- Convenient time-saving format
Brief, debrief and result measurement meetings are guided by our structured methodology which enables us to offer helpful guidance to clients throughout the process. Throughout these meetings, we pay careful attention to ensuring that your valuable time is respected and that we gain the required mutual alignment.
We can deliver all services remotely via Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or your preferred video conferencing tool.
- Friendly and approachable consultants
At the heart of our culture are empathy and humility. Our talented and professional consultants are approachable, sincere and helpful. We believe in always doing what’s right for our relationships with clients. While clients enjoy quality relationships with our consultants we always strive to deliver honest and constructive advice.
Conclusion
DotActiv is not just a software vendor. We are also a team of category management experts who are ready to help you achieve your goals. You can learn more about our different category management services here.
If you are looking to achieve category management success with DotActiv’s Retail Business Intelligence services, you can speak to one of our consultants by booking a custom exploratory consultation here.
