3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics >
2 Table of Contents 1. The Challenges 2. Introducing Vitria OI for Streaming Analytics 3. The Benefits 4. How Vitria OI Complements Hadoop 5. Summary The Challenges Today s retailers are in an extremely competitive environment. They can no longer afford to fail to understand and anticipate their customers needs. Their customers are inundated with choices that are, literally, just a click away. Very often, retailers have less than a minute to influence customer decisions and perceptions. To achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, a retail establishment must be able to excel in the following areas: 1. Creating a highly responsive supply chain to meet the needs of their customers 2. Engaging in real-time, 1-to-1 marketing with their customers 3. Proactively detecting and preventing fraud Introducing Vitria Operational Intelligence Vitria Operational Intelligence (OI) empowers retailers to quickly act on insights gleaned from streaming data and information while it still counts. It brings together state-of-the-art stream processing, real-time analytics, visual dashboards, and business process management capabilities into one unified platform to help retailers take immediate process-based action on the discovered insights. Streaming data includes events and data from computer networks and RFID tags, RSS feeds for weather and traffic, as well as social media. Stored data includes information in databases, data warehouses, enterprise applications, and Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop. With Vitria OI, retailers benefit from the following: 1. Visibility into real-time events 2. Insight into what these events mean to the organization 3. The ability to take immediate action on the discovered insights Vitria Operational Intelligence Architecture Diagram
3 Streaming Analytics Benefits 1. Real-Time End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility 2. Real-Time 1-to-1 Marketing 3. Real-Time Fraud Detection & Prevention 3 Ways to Capitalize on Streaming Analytics Streaming Analytics for End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility Retail and quick serve restaurant chains, with hundreds of store locations as well as an online presence, are constantly struggling to get a complete picture of the progress of their orders through an increasingly complex supply chain. The challenge of being able to track-and-trace purchase orders through to shipment fulfillment arises from the fact that orders typically touch numerous siloed systems as they move from suppliers and logistics partners to distribution centers to store locations. There is no single system of record that can provide retailers with endto-end visibility. This challenge is further compounded when dealing with perishable goods or seasonal items. In a highly competitive market, where customers have a plethora of choices that are often, just a click away, retailers have no choice, but to make sure that they are never out-of-stock. This calls for an extremely responsive supply chain that is only possible through complete crossenterprise visibility and the ability to immediately address issues and fluctuations in demand. How End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility Works Retailers can save significant amounts of revenue and improve customer satisfaction by accurately predicting their inventory needs, precisely determining when it is time to reorder, and knowing when a shortage might occur. Vitria OI empowers supply chain managers to easily track-and-trace operational activity across applications and organizations, in real-time, and then take immediate action on the uncovered insights a task that is almost impossible with siloed monitoring systems. With Vitria OI, retailers can continuously monitor their supply chain processes so as to quickly detect shortages, overages, or missed shipments, especially when dealing with priority orders, which will ultimately reduce customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss.
4 Catching emerging problems in a near real time fashion can add significant monetary results in time and customer sensitive supply chains. - Jim Sinur, Former Research VP at Gartner, Inc. Very often, retailers do not have a complete picture of the actual supply chain process paths. With Vitria OI, retailers can easily tap into supply chain activity events from their ERP systems and other enterprise applications and correlate it with other business data, such as store location information and other shipment data, to uncover how goods actually flow from suppliers and partners to their final destination. Retailers can establish a baseline process from the discovered process over which they can define KPIs that can be continuously monitored for deviations and corrective processes immediately kicked-off, so as to reduce the potential for unhappy customers. Streaming Analytics for Real-Time, 1-to-1 Marketing The goal of marketing, for any retailer, is to identify a potential customer and send personalized marketing offers to him or her when it is most relevant. It is no longer enough to know that a certain customer bought a shirt from a particular retail store last month. Going forward, retailers will need to combine and analyze such data points, plus others, from a variety of different resources, in real-time. Retailers will still want to know about that past purchase. However, more importantly, retailers will also want to know when that customer is actually in the store or online, considering a purchase, and therefore likely to convert an offer into an order. Ultimately, retailers need to create a unique customer experience based on a customer s geographic location, past purchase history, and behavior analytics. The objective for retailers now is real-time, 1-to-1 marketing reaching an individual customer at precisely the right moment through the right channel. Real-Time, 1-to-1 Marketing Based on Geographic Location Vitria OI helps retailers increase customer loyalty and satisfaction by giving them the relevant insight to engage in real-time, 1-to-1 marketing. With Vitria OI, retailers can correlate information, such as a customer s profile, current location, as well as past and present purchasing patterns to present the right offer at the right time through the right channel.
5 Increasingly, retailers are incorporating radio frequency identification (RFID) chips within their customer loyalty cards. These can be used to identify individuals as they walk through a particular store. By correlating past buying patterns with their location and customer profile, Vitria OI can be used to generate up-sell recommendations at the Point-of-Sale (PoS). Often, loyalty card members provide retailers with their mobile phone numbers and other details, thereby providing additional channels that can be used to make real-time marketing offers. Using Vitria OI, a retailer can correlate a customer s geographic location and profile, detect in real-time if he/ she is within a few feet of a store location, and then text him/ her a personalized promotion that would be hard to decline. Streaming Analytics for Security & Fraud Detection According to Forrester Research, global retailers lose between $200 billion and $250 billion every year to fraud. Fraud costs retailers significant revenues, in addition to the time and resources it takes to recoup these lost revenues and deal with the negative publicity and drop in customer satisfaction levels. By the time many retailers have actually detected the fraud, the transaction has already cleared and the person committing the fraud has disappeared. The challenge with detecting fraud lies in being able to identify it early, ideally at the point it is being committed, rather than waiting for credit card companies to respond. Retailers need to detect and act on two types of fraud: 1) illegal or illicit behavior from within the company, such as a nefarious employee, and 2) fraudulent transactions that originate from outside the company, such as credit card fraud. With Vitria OI, retailers can monitor all activity in real-time and get alerted to outliers and unusual activity. For external fraud, retailers can incorporate quickly changing fraudulent characteristics into new fraud models, and deploy these updated models rapidly to predict potentially fraudulent transactions so they can be detected faster. Fraud Detection & Prevention
6 Vitria OI helps form the basis for a real-time fraud detection and prevention solution. With Vitria OI, behavior can be tracked using real-time data feeds that are compared to baseline reference data, analyzed, and displayed using live dashboards. Furthermore, Vitria OI can complement existing security solutions by detecting patterns in their results and comparing those patterns to current behavior, in real-time. Complementing Hadoop & Other Offline Big Data Analytics Retailers continue to amass vast volumes of data. The most obvious source of this data is about the customers themselves. In the past, this data was only used for basic customer relationship management. Other Big Data sources include pointof-sale transactions, clickstreams, and third-party sources. In addition, sensors and RFID tags are being added to inventory pallets and customer loyalty cards to monitor supplier and customer activity in real-time. Retailers are storing more and more data about inventory management and customer relationship management in order to tap into this valuable resource for customer insights. Using Big Data frameworks, such as Hadoop, these large data sets provide an incredible opportunity for greater insight and intelligence on business operations. It helps retailers monitor inventory levels, segment customers, personalize offerings, conduct deeper analysis, and improve decisions. However, this analysis is performed on Big Data at rest. By combining these at rest analytics with the streaming data analytics provided by Vitria OI, retailers have a formidable set of tools with which to tame the data deluge for both Big Data at rest and Big Data in motion. Vitria OI provides the ability to visualize real-time feeds and take real-time action on significant events. Where the same feeds are stored in a Big Data framework, Vitria OI can work alongside the Big Data store, providing the ability to replay past events, analyze those events for patterns, and compare past events with the current situation. Using this combined approach, Sales and Marketing, for example, can understand personalized customer behavior, creating marketing campaigns to an audience of one. Real-time insight enables the creation of novel location- and time-based product offerings. Store managers can create precise offer bundles based on an individual customer s preferences, and the success of new product launches can be monitored in real-time against the business plan and adjustments made on-thefly.
7 Summary: The retailers that will break away from the rest of the pack are the ones that can crack the code for unleashing the power of the data that they have at their fingertips to drive real-time action. Vitria OI provides innovative retailers with that opportunity. Retailers can continuously analyze and act on live, streaming data and use the real-time Operational Intelligence that they glean to forge new and improved relationships with their customers, better understand and anticipate customer needs, and turn every interaction into a potential opportunity to generate revenue. Vitria OI is the only unified solution that can continuously monitor business activity across applications, spot bottlenecks, and speed corrective action through alerts and guided workflows. It can integrate, correlate, and analyze streaming events for richer, real-time insight in context.
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