Solutions for Retail

The retail environment has never been more competitive. Online and mobile shopping channels, with their lower overhead costs, exert constant pressure on retailers to deliver low prices while remaining profitable. These channels also give consumers the ability to instantly satisfy their shopping desires, eroding the allure of the in-store experience. At the same time, shoppers are better informed on prices, products, and promotions than ever before, heightening their expectations for customer service. Successful retailers are transforming into Intelligent Enterprises, embracing data analytics for their competitive edge.

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Top retail companies trust MicroStrategy.

Customer Insight Analysis

Better serve and engage with customers, build brand loyalty, and drive revenue growth.

Financial Analysis

Streamline reporting processes and analyze performance data to help improve the profitability of merchandise, customers, and operations.

Loss Prevention

Leverage exception-based reporting and predictive analytics to monitor, detect, and take action against inventory loss from fraud, employee error, or theft .

Merchandising Optimization

Proactively adjust product assortments, inventory levels, and pricing strategies to help increase profitability.

Promotional Analysis and Planning

Optimize promotions and agilely adjust marketing campaigns to increase effectiveness​.

Supply Chain Management

Minimize delays, reduce inefficiencies, and maximize profit margins with real-time visibility into supply chain operations.

Distribution Center Operations

Provide distribution center supervisors with the business insight and capabilities to streamline warehouse operations and better engage with their employees.

Clienteling

Arm store sales associates with a catalogue of information on customers, products, and promotions so they can provide a superior, personalized customer shopping experience​.

Digital Loyalty Card

Transform and personalize the user experience across all customer channels.

Enterprise Digital Badge

Secure access to information systems and facilities with digital identity badges​.

Sales Productivity

Boost sales productivity by giving associates instant access to training materials, product information, sales performance data, and more.

Store Inspection

Streamline the store inspection and audit process by enabling mobile, on-site data entry and fast information sharing.

Store Operations

Provide store management with seamless in-app access to their information and system needs, while also allowing them to take action from the sales floor.

Vendor Portal

Analyze vendor performance and drive sales and supply chain improvements​.

Customer Insight Analysis

The Challenge

Retailers struggle to obtain a 360-degree view of their customers and fail to truly understand their customers’ unique profiles.

The Solution

MicroStrategy makes it quick and easy to make sense of customer data from various touchpoints for real-time decisions that have a direct impact on profit margins. With this data, retailers can create more targeted promotions, tailor store assortments to specific clientele, and create a superior, personalized shopping experience for customers at all stages of the buying cycle. MicroStrategy enables retailers to create reports, dashboards, and applications that track in-house promotions, display market basket analysis, and encourage competition between vendors for limited shelf space. 

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Financial Analysis

The Challenge

Retail organizations often struggle to maintain various line-of-business reporting tools and are in need of an enterprise-grade analytics solution that can satisfy the needs of every user in the organization. Retailers need to ensure that their financial reporting analytics tool is secure, consistent (single version of the truth), and can handle large, complex data sets.

The Solution

Financial analysis and accountability is imperative to every retailer. MicroStrategy enterprise-grade financial analysis solutions ensure that everyone from executives to analysts are empowered with the insight they need to more efficiently manage their daily business, make better strategic decisions, and effectively collaborate with their colleagues. These applications easily integrate data from a wide range of sources and allow users to seamlessly access critical analytics and financial information about merchandise, customers, operations, and more. MicroStrategy’s powerful data visualization capabilities improve retailers’ ability to identify and take advantage of business opportunities. Application users have access to a secure, personalized view of the financial information that is most relevant to their role in the organization.

Financial Analysis

Loss Prevention

The Challenge

Inventory shrink cost retailers $44 billion in 2014.

The Solution

For retailers, the combined cost associated with shrinkage, theft, and fraud can be substantial. That’s why loss prevention (LP) is a key bottom line issue for all retail organizations. Leveraging exception-based reporting and predictive analytics, MicroStrategy loss prevention solutions let LP managers quickly analyze historical data to identify trends in organized crime or employee fraud, as indicated by discounted transactions, penny sales, same card transactions, or after hour refunds. Our powerful visualizations make it easy for LP managers to understand when employee or vendor errors are occurring so they can initiate training to address these issues. These solutions incorporate transactional input forms that enable loss prevention personnel or store managers to submit case data directly from their app while on-site. This capability allows them to quickly communicate data with headquarters as well as share external theft information with nearby stores. By drilling down and analyzing transaction and inventory data, LP managers can spot abnormalities, take immediate action, and significantly reduce losses associated with inventory shrinkage.

Loss Prevention

Merchandising Optimization

The Challenge

Retailers lose $1.1 trillion annually in global overstock and out-of-stock costs.

The Solution

Retailers are under constant pressure to balance their inventory levels with in-stock positions while maintaining product assortments that are relevant and fresh. MicroStrategy merchandising solutions help retailers optimize how they stock, place, and price products. Our powerful analytics provide merchandising departments with the insight they need to better tier product assortments and inventory levels based on geographical needs and store sales volume. Exception-based reporting, which highlights outliers such as best and worstselling products, gives buyers early visibility into issues so they can immediately modify future product orders, adjust pricing plans, and negotiate vendor returns. Comprehensive, visually appealing dashboards make it easy for buyers to understand how various promotions, brands, and business categories are performing. This allows them to make the necessary strategy adjustments and better plan for the future. By embracing analytics, retail merchandising departments are able to make quicker, more informed decisions leading to better category management and in-stock rates, improved profitability, and increased customer satisfaction.

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Promotional Analysis and Planning

The Challenge

Retailers are unable to accurately predict item affinity due to their inability to draw valuable customer insight from website logs, purchase history, promotional interactions, and consumer product feedback. 

The Solution

For most retailers, market basket affinity is a well-known tool for cross-promotions and marketing. MicroStrategy provides the means to analyze customer patterns from weblogs, purchase history, and promotions to identify and predict item affinity. This valuable insight enables them to better manage their promotions and other activities such as planogram and price planning. Whether it is weblogs that track user browsing patterns, or transaction and loyalty history from a relational database, MicroStrategy can access data across multiple sources and holistically analyze this information. Retail weblogs stored in Hadoop clusters can be seamlessly blended with other data such as purchase history, promotional information, and even customer product feedback received in stores. Retailers are able to then identify affinity items and related subcategories for a specific customer. The propensity to purchase items can be easily identified via dashboards or ad-hoc data discovery. With this sequential affinity analysis, retailers can send specific and timely email marketing or live online recommendations with bundled promotions that will drive traffic and increase revenue. Additionally, retailers can take advantage of real-time analytics to optimize promotions and adjust campaigns on the fly to increase effectiveness.

Promotional Analysis and Planning

Supply Chain Management

The Challenge

46% of North American retailers still use static spreadsheets to manage their supply chains.

The Solution

To maintain healthy profit margins and respond to consumer expectations for lightning-fast delivery times, retailers must continually seek opportunities to remove delays and inefficiency from their supply chains. MicroStrategy gives retailers instant visibility into the end-to-end health and status of their supply chains, providing the critical KPIs and threshold-based alerts necessary for fast decision-making. Applications and reports focused on distribution center activities enable retailers to better manage the workflow between receiving and shipping processes as well as operating costs. These solutions also provide retailers with visibility into KPIs related to shipping costs, units shipped, percent of truck capacity used, and driver performance. By providing detailed insights into supplier invoice accuracy, on-time deliveries, and order fulfillment rates, these applications enable retailers to partner with their suppliers to improve their performance as well. Threshold-based alerts for items held in customs too long or for out-of-stock merchandise that needs to be expedited to stores further improve supply chain efficiency. With this real-time insight, retailers can take informed, targeted steps to reduce transportation costs, optimize inventory levels, streamline distribution center processes, and improve supplier performance and negotiations.

Supply Chain Management

Distribution Center Operations

The Challenge

DC supervisors are tasked with managing warehouse operations as well as the productivity, safety, and career development of their workers. However, they are often required to go to a back office to access reporting and to input data related to safety, operations, and employee interactions. This process is not efficient and leaves the warehouse floor unattended.

The Solution

MicroStrategy Mobile apps allow DC supervisors to be on the warehouse floor instead of in a back office. These solutions arm them with all of the operations information they need to efficiently run their distribution centers and provide them with the ability to scan barcodes for item details, initiate backstock pulls, and agilely adjust shipping and receiving process workflows. These apps allow DC Supervisors to instantly capture images of safety violations and upload them to the appropriate system. Furthermore, these apps provide them with the ability to log conversations with their workers revolving around attendance, training, safety, and quality of work. Comments can be input directly into the app, and employees can acknowledge that the conversations took place via the signature capture, increasing their accountability. MicroStrategy distribution center operation apps lead to higher supervisor productivity, increased adherence to policies and procedures, streamlined operations, and improved employee engagement through side-by-side supervision.

Distribution Center Operations

Clienteling

The Challenge

86% of customers would pay more for a better customer experience. Only 29% find sales associates knowledgeable and helpful.

The Solution

MicroStrategy Mobile apps arm sales associates with a complete catalog of information on customers, products, and promotions to ensure consistent and informed customer service. Our platform integrates with all CRM, product, and promotional systems, enabling retail associates to provide an omni-channel, personalized shopping experience to their customers. These clienteling apps guide store associates in the sales process, allow them to view loyalty program and purchase information, provide them with product recommendations, and can even incorporate training videos and documents. If an item or size is unavailable in their store, an associate can purchase it for the customer from a nearby store or online. Additionally, these apps enable store personnel to submit item feedback from customers so that assortments and personalized product recommendations can be refined in the future. These powerful clienteling apps empower retailers to transform the shopping experience in their stores, leading to improved customer loyalty, more omni-channel customers, increased customer conversion rates, and a stronger competitive advantage.

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Digital Loyalty Card

The Challenge

As business becomes increasingly digital, blurring the line between physical and online boundaries, digitally-savvy customers expect a consistent and personalized experience at every touchpoint. More than ever, today’s customers expect a predictable, frictionless, and personalized multi-channel customer experience. That’s why, to be successful, retailers must first build a unified view of customers—a non-trivial endeavor that can be expensive and quite complex.

The Solution

Usher provides retailers with a unified view of each customer’s identity which can be tied across all customer channels by integrating data from other sales, service, marketing, and enterprise systems using a smartphone. This enables retailers to build an exceptional digital customer experience through personalized and trusted customer interactions across all engagement channels. Retailers can easily and securely log into online systems, remotely verify customers with a secure one-time passcode, seamlessly log into kiosks, and provide a customized shopping experience in physical stores by leveraging Usher’s Bluetooth technology. Usher’s analytics capabilities, armed with a preintegrated identity schema, make it simple for retailers to build dashboards to gain insight into user preferences from anywhere, in real time. Usher also enables store associates to deliver a personalized user experience when engaging with customers.

Digital Loyalty Card

Enterprise Digital Badge

The Challenge

The retail environment has never been more competitive. Online and mobile shopping channels, with their lower overhead costs, exert constant pressure on retailers to deliver low prices while remaining profitable. Also, the lack of visibility into actionable intelligence hinders retailers’ ability to be competitive, maximize productivity, and to fully optimize physical and digital assets.

The Solution

Usher’s digital badges enable authorized retail personnel and supply chain partners to securely and seamlessly access offices, stores, warehouses, and critical information systems by leveraging users’ personal smartphones. With Usher, retailers can implement strong, multi-factor authentication with features that include push notification, biometrics, onetime passwords, face-to-face validation, and Bluetooth proximity. Usher provides visibility into user behavior and actionable intelligence across multiple enterprise systems, letting retail organizations optimize asset utilization, improve productivity, and digitally transform their business performance. Usher is compatible with existing retail systems and easily integrates with existing mobile applications using APIs.

Enterprise Digital Badge

Sales Productivity

The Challenge

Thanks to high staff turnover rates, retailers often find it difficult to ensure associates are well trained for required tasks and customer interactions.

The Solution

Retailers can leverage MicroStrategy Mobile to quickly deploy sales productivity apps to their store-based employees. These apps empower store associates with everything they need to drive more sales and boost productivity. Each sales associate has easy access to training materials related to sales tips, merchandising best practices, featured brands, or individual products. Store personnel can also use these apps to view their individual or store performance data as well as compare performance against their peers. These apps can even incorporate competitions and incentives for top-performing associates to further increase performance levels and promote user adoption. By leveraging compelling sales productivity apps, retailers can ensure that their store personnel is consistently well-informed and trained so they can better interact with customers to drive revenue.

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Store Inspection

The Challenge

Store inspectors invest too much time on pre-inspection spreadsheet preparation. Their auditing process is inefficient because they have to wait until the end of the day to input the results into their PCs. Store managers often don’t receive inspection results for several weeks. 

The Solution

MicroStrategy Mobile store inspection apps eliminate paperwork and long preparation times, and ensure auditors are always working with live data. These solutions incorporate transactional input forms that empower inspectors to submit data directly from their app while on-site. They can immediately review inspection results with store managers and spend more time coaching store teams. These apps also provide auditors with the ability to view audit history and analysis for stores in their territory and chain-wide. Location awareness helps inspectors determine which stores to visit next based on current location. By streamlining the store inspection process, retailers can increase audit efficiency, facilitate better internal communication, and improve productivity and profitability.

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Store Operations

The Challenge

Only 19% of retailers report using up-to-date technology for realtime monitoring of store KPIs.* 

The Solution

MicroStrategy helps store managers quickly access real-time sales, inventory, and customer information so they can analyze buying trends, evaluate promotion success, and benchmark their store performance against peers. These apps give store managers a one-stop shop for all of their information needs and provide them with access to training, corporate communications, visual update documents, sales best practices, and more. Data-driven ‘smart alerts’ ensure that store personnel are focused on addressing high-priority issues related to out-ofstock merchandise, labor management, or promotion execution. Transactional functionality enables app users to take action on the insight they have just received directly from the selling floor, saving valuable time and leading to increased revenue. These comprehensive, user-friendly apps empower store managers to make better decisions, improve productivity, and increase their focus on serving customers, coaching associates, and driving sales.

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Vendor Portal

The Challenge

Retail vendors often lack access to realtime business intelligence. This leads to communication frustrations, as merchants often have access to more current data than vendors. Additionally, merchants have limited time available to review vendor performance information at the level of detail needed to drive better results.

The Solution

MicroStrategy provides relevant and timely data to both merchants and vendors, fostering collaboration that helps drive efficiency in cost containment and improve sales performance. Vendors and merchants both have a secure, common view of current data related to product and category sales performance, inventory, profitability, supply chain, and promotions. Retailers control the data that individual vendors can view, and vendors are able to drive better business results for their products and categories. These solutions also help vendors benchmark their performance against peers at an anonymous level, view product forecasts, and better understand how they can use promotional funds effectively. Also, merchants are able to communicate more effectively with vendors throughout the season which helps facilitate better negotiations. By utilizing a platform that provides timely, valuable business insights to vendors, retailers can drive supply chain efficiency and improve sales performance.

Vendor Portal

Success Stories in Retail

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"It feels seamless, whether I’m on my iPad, on my laptop, or receiving a report from a printer. It really is one solution at the end of the day."

Danielle Schmelkin VP of Business Intelligence and Customer Engagement, Coach

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“If you depend on price, you’re going to lose. You have to create some unique value, some unique service that others aren’t going to give them.”

Richard Smallwood President and CEO, Falken Tire

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"We are seeing our business in a whole new light. Deploying MicroStrategy Mobile to our executives is the next achievement in delivering actionable, accessible, and visually compelling information."

Bruce Yen Director of Business Intelligence, GUESS?

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"It's not just putting the right data in our hands but the agility with which we put the data and MicroStrategy has played a huge role."

Kiran Nagarur Sr Director, Data Science & Engineering, Fanatics

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Coach

Falken Tire

GUESS?

Fanatics

Retail Resources

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