SAP Helps Retailers Cash in on Big Data
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
Two undeniable truths are becoming more evident every day: The big-data explosion is unstoppable and big data’s potential business value is enormous. The challenge today, however, is that much of big data’s value remains conceptual, which leads to the question: how can businesses most quickly cash in on big data’s vast conceptual benefits?
SAP has answered this question with the SAP HANA platform, and since it first demoed HANA at Sapphire in 2010, SAP has made significant strides integrating HANA with its enterprise applications. Most recently, at the NRF Convention and Expo in January, SAP introduced the SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail analytic application powered by the SAP HANA platform.
Swimming in big data and characterized by fierce competition, unrelenting margin pressure and constant, fast-paced change, the retail industry is ripe for a solution that empowers merchandising, marketing, and store operations staff to make fast, informed decisions that drive efficiency, profitability, competitiveness and growth.
By helping retailers turn conceptual big-data benefits into concrete business gains, the SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail analytic application -- with its advanced, HANA-powered capabilities -- is sure to have a fast, lasting and profound impact on the retail industry.
Big data snapshot:
The McKinsey Group estimates that enterprises globally stored more than 7 exabytes of new data in 2010 alone. According to Gartner, enterprise data will increase 650% over the next five years. IDC pegs enterprise data doubling every 18 months.
The promise of big data is both compelling and straightforward -- crunch large data volumes to unlock insight that informs timely decisions that boost efficiency, the bottom line and competitiveness.
The McKinsey Group puts a hefty dollar value on the business use of big data -- estimating big data’s potential value to be $30 billion annually for the U.S. health care industry and $330 billion annually for Europe’s public sector, among other bold big-data value assertions.
Retailers, according to The McKinsey Group, could see as much as a 60% increase in their operating margins by taking advantage of big data.
With rewards this high, businesses are not and should not dally on the sideline when it comes to cashing in on big data.
A recent TDWI survey reports that 34% of organizations are tapping into large data sets using advanced analytics tools. According to a recent Ovum study, 44% of businesses storing more than 1TB of data plan to invest in big-data technology in the next two to five years, and Gartner ranks big data solutions as one of the top enterprise technologies in 2012.
Big data & SAP’s recent retail moves
Traditionally, big data has posed big challenges for retailers -- from the cost of storing ever-growing mountains of data to the complexity of integrating numerous, disparate data sources to the difficulty of analyzing big data quickly enough to make critical decisions in a timeframe that matters.
As formidable as they are, these challenges in no way diminish big data’s potential value for retailers. Success in retail hinges on better understanding customer behavior, predicting purchasing trends, identifying new sales opportunities, maintaining inventory control, gauging customer sentiment, individualizing the customer experience, strengthening customer loyalty, unifying multiple sales channels, etc.
Successfully executing all of these activities depends on numerous individuals throughout the retail enterprise having the unfettered ability to crunch petabytes of data -- structured/unstructured /operational /transactional -- into accurate, actionable information in near-real time. From a historical perspective, these are truly huge volumes.
Enter the SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail analytic application powered by the SAP HANA platform.
With more than 3,400 retail customers -- including many of the world’s most successful brands -- and 40 years of industry experience, SAP is no stranger to challenges and pressures that retailers face on a day-to-day basis.
With the Sales Analysis for Retail application, SAP brings this wealth of industry experience together with the unprecedented big-data power and capabilities of HANA to provide retailers with a robust, scalable solution that delivers accurate, real-time reporting of critical information and allows for interactive, nearly real-time analysis of enormous data volumes.
Furthering SAP’s mission to make analytics & BI easier to use and available to more people throughout the enterprise, SAP Sales Analysis for Retail features an array of prebuilt data models, key performance indicators (KPIs), role-specific dashboards and customized reports.
Leveraging HANA, the application also offers much-needed data integration capabilities for vastly improved scalability and performance.
In another notable move on the retail front -- one which adds yet another arrow to SAP’s big-data quiver -- SAP acquired SAF Simulation, Analysis and Forecasting AG, a global leader in automated ordering and forecasting software.
SAP plans to integrate the entire SAF portfolio into the SAP Forecasting and Replenishment application, enabling retailers and other consumer-facing companies to operate in close to real time as customer-driven supply networks.
SAP Forecasting and Replenishment helps retailers reduce the risks associated with shortages and surplus, lower costs and better match products on the shelf to specific consumer segments.
Now powered by the SAP HANA platform, SAP’s retail industry solutions help retailer businesses finally cash in on big data -- enabling transformative, lightning-fast operational insights, flexible opportunistic business strategy and a sustainable competitive advantage.
