Description
Optimize processes, reduce costs, and gain greater visibility into retail operations More than any other business driver, competition characterizes the retail industry.
Business Intelligence for Retail
Panorama Necto
TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER
© Panorama Software 2011
Optimize processes, reduce costs, and gain greater visibility into
retail operations
More than any other business driver, competition characterizes the retail industry. Globalization,
deflation, diversification of sales channels and, most of all, changing customer demands have merged
to create a cutthroat environment in which retailers struggle to turn a profit.
These profitability challenges involve both revenue and cost. Sales remain flat with many companies
not understanding customer behavior and buying habits well enough to make the right decisions
about product, price, promotion and placement. And without the ability to explore every facet of the
organization across business units and geographies, it can be a struggle to understand and manage
the costs required to do business.
In the old millennium, product and service were prime competitive differentiators. Excellence in
products and service is still essential, of course, but such attributes tend to only be differentiators for
short windows of time before competitors catch up. The only enduring way to stand apart is to have
better information ? the critical ingredient that enables a retailer to outmaneuver the competition
through a continuing flow of renewal and innovation. That means an enterprise’s information
management strategy can either be its most compelling asset or its most limiting deficit.
In a mobile society with a diverse customer base, retailers require daily or even real-time information
to act on customer needs quickly. Retailers can no longer gain essential intelligence by capturing
information in monthly or weekly reports like they did ten — or even five — years ago. Today,
customer needs are not easily detectable, nor are sales peaks and dips so easily predictable. To
maintain productivity and profitability, enterprises must leverage data and information as never before
in order to plan and analyze operations, discern shifting market demands, collaborate with suppliers,
and track consumer trends.
In response, leading retailers around the globe are redefining the way they do business with their
customers. Utilizing innovative new technologies, they are finding new ways to understand market
trends, new avenues for meeting consumer needs and preferences, and new opportunities to tailor
each shopping experience to match the expectations of every individual customer.
That’s where advanced business intelligence (BI) solution like Panorama’s Necto? which addresses
purchasing, profitability, marketing efforts, inventory and store management, and customer service ?
improves top- and bottom-line retailer performance. The power of BI extends across the enterprise to
integrate disparate infrastructure and applications, empower employees to make fast decisions,
© Panorama Software 2011
improve the transactional and informational flow, increase customer service and loyalty, and
streamline operations at both corporate and store levels.
It’s not surprising that in an Aberdeen Group report, 76% of retailers surveyed already have or plan to
use BI. It’s also no coincidence that 80% of best-in-class (BIC) retailers ? those who have
comparable year over year sales increases of greater than 3% ? use BI, compared to only 50% of
“laggards” (those whose sales are flat). Also telling, 70% of BIC retailers indicate C-level involvement
in BI data management, versus 58% for average performers and 50% for laggards.
Panorama Necto delivers the complete range of BI capabilities: reporting, analysis, scorecarding,
dashboards, business event management as well as data integration ? and turns data about
customers, merchandise and operations into knowledge. And that knowledge provides greater insight
into performance, empowering retailers to make more informed decisions, gain a competitive
advantage, strengthen customer and vendor loyalty, and improve profitability.
BI for retailers means the ability to quickly and accurately analyze vast amounts of sales and stock
data, and then transmit a response out through a highly distributed network of staff and locations.
There are a number of key areas in the retail industry where an advanced BI solution ? one that
provides immediate access to real-time actionable data ? becomes an extremely valuable
operational and decision-making tool.
Customer intelligence helps retailers identify, acquire, activate, serve and retain the most profitable
customers. Merchandise intelligence helps retailers drive revenue, protect margins and earn
customer loyalty with optimized merchandise plans, assortments, pricing, promotions, space plans
and allocations ? all driven by unparalleled demand forecasting and predictive analytics. Operations
intelligence lets retailers leverage organizational assets to trade with vendors and serve customers
more efficiently and profitably. Performance management solutions provide the ability to analyze,
forecast and maximize profits across the entire retail enterprise by monitoring cost and performance,
helping retailers drive disparate functional units toward common goals.
In an industry with fierce competition, low margins, blurring segments, multiple sales channels, and
high volatility, retailers can dramatically improve sales and operations through better, smarter use of
customer and product information. Panorama Necto closes the loop between strategy, corporate
enterprise systems, suppliers, in-store execution, and the familiar technologies already in the hands
of consumers. Based on proven technologies, this powerful BI solution dovetails with retail industry
best practices, enabling retailers to optimize processes, reduce costs, and gain greater visibility into
business conditions in order to make fast and accurate business decisions.
© Panorama Software 2011
Improve Customer and Store Profitability
Merchants can no longer base critical merchandising decisions on intuition or historical reports and
expect the desired results. Instead, retailers need a way to maximize the profitability of the
merchandising process while exceeding customer expectations ? a system that provides more
valuable information about demand, customer behavior, category performance and more. Most of all,
this information needs to be available from one source, so it can be accessed and used quickly to
make more profitable merchandising decisions.
But because the retail business is also so dynamic ? sales for one weekend could make or break an
entire month ? analysis systems must provide the ability for every level of a retail organization to
sense and respond quickly to any challenges that arise, to instantly assess victory or defeat and then
adapt for future benefit.
Traditionally, ideas about merchandizing and customer behavior have been forged using simplistic
query and reporting tools coupled with instinct and intuition. Optimized answers to these questions
have been all but impossible. In fact, too many retailers still rely on simple operational and transaction
data to determine future outcomes on the hope that hindsight can generate useful insight and
foresight. But knowing how many transactions took place is not the same thing as understanding why
they took place, which factors influenced the outcome, and how to optimize the result in the future.
Spreadsheets provide a rudimentary understanding of the business, but they can’t provide the kinds
of answers needed to elevate the retail organization into proactive, differentiated, sustainable
success.
Powerful business intelligence (BI) solutions like Panorama Necto enable retailers to analyze
transaction patterns based on past purchases and interactions, and then use that information to
influence future purchases. The results drive new levels of value by generating product purchase
correlations that enable retailers to anticipate the customer’s needs even before they are expressed.
This capability maximizes cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and it can enable smarter store
layouts that position key products based on the intentions of customers at different times of the day
and different days of the week.
Panorama Necto can power sophisticated market basket analysis, helping retailers understand what
items are likely to be purchased together (or not), primarily with the aim of identifying cross-selling
opportunities. The point-of-sale scanner produces transaction data, which can be loaded into a data-
warehousing environment to determine merchandising, product placement and shelving decisions.
Using BI tools, users can drill down the product dimension to automatically retrieve the associated
market basket summary associated with that product from the underlying relational data store.
© Panorama Software 2011
Amusingly, the most commonly cited example of market basket analysis is the finding that young
fathers buy diapers and six packs of beer Thursday nights, which may sound trivial, but in fact
enables appropriate placement of products for cross-selling and up-selling.
Pilot Travel Centers, which owns and operate over 270 combined retail, restaurant and fuel outlets in
40 U.S. states, previously depended on vendors’ reps for its only rudimentary market basket analysis,
but had no way to verify their claims. However with the launch of Panorama BI Solutions, together
with a new point-of-sale system, Pilot has begun its own market basket analysis and the results are
proving fruitful. For example, it has found that smokers often spend considerably more dollars when
buying cigarettes, enabling the organization of displays in a novel and more lucrative way.
Pilot is continuing its differential analysis, comparing results between different stores, between
customers in different demographic groups, between different days of the week, different seasons of
the year, etc. and expects investigating such differences to yield useful insights which will improve
company sales.
Operate at an Optimal Level of Performance
In order to compete and prosper, retailers today face a mandate to operate at an optimal level of
performance to meet financial and organizational expectations. This mandate is transforming the way
retail organizations do business.
Profitable execution in retail is all about the details ? from store execution to logistics and
distribution, payroll and manpower management, IT infrastructure, finances and non-inventory
supplies. The list of considerations is long, but intelligent use of working capital and management of
operating expenses ensures that top-line revenue and margin performance is not eroded by
inefficiency, incompetence or fraud before it reaches the bottom line.
But measuring and managing performance — metrics, plans and forecasts, and detailed actual
results — is not a simple proposition. The large volumes of data an organization amasses — POS,
merchandising, supply chain, financials, human resources, to name a few — often reside in disparate
legacy across the enterprise, and IT processes provide limited visibility into the business. It is
especially difficult given that there can be many tools used to analyze and report on the data, creating
further islands of information.
© Panorama Software 2011
Panorama Necto consolidates and leverages critical data, and turns it into meaningful information and
reports that everyone can use. Operational intelligence solutions from Panorama let retailers take
advantage of their organizational assets to sell and deliver merchandise and services.
Timely, accurate BI gives store managers access to real time information across an entire store’s
operations, enabling them to make more accurate decisions more quickly. And by automating many
back-office administrative functions, managers will be able to spend less time on administrative tasks
and significantly more time out on the floor, working with customers.
Managers are also empowered to make fast, accurate decisions about labor deployment, risk
management, product promotions, inventory control and much more. And sales associates can
improve customer interactions, increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and anticipate customer
needs. The results include enhanced customer satisfaction and greater store efficiency.
Panorama Necto can also look for patterns of fraudulent activity and then flag suspicious POS
transactions for closer examination. Taken one step further, it can generate alerts that notify store
manager whenever products aren’t driving expected gross margins so that the store manager can
check to see if the labor mix is correct, signage is appropriate, and inventory position is accurate. This
access to real-time store performance information will transform the store manager into an
empowered decision-maker who can help the store achieve higher levels of business performance.
In response to inconsistent management from store to store, Pilot Travel Centers implemented
Panorama as a key component of its intranet site “the Hub” to present and publish sales data for
budget and year-over-year comparison. The portal serves as a source of data from the VP of
Operations down to retail managers, who can now see whether they are hitting sales targets, meeting
budgets and breaking sales records ? all critical performance motivators.
The first phase of the implementation addressed Pilot’s deli sales ? hot dogs, soda, and coffee ?
and exploited the power of Panorama BI Solution, combined with the motivational ability of timely,
easy-to-understand, indisputable data. And the results were extraordinary.
By simply allowing managers an easy-to-use view of their sales, debits and national ranking, David
Clothier, Pilot’s Controller and Treasurer, said, “We will easily see, at minimum, a 2% improvement in
sales and a 1.5% improvement in margin, adding an additional $1.8 million to the bottom line. Those
results are linked directly to our enhanced reporting and analysis – we can identify sales,
performance and buying issues quickly and easily to act immediately.”
© Panorama Software 2011
Deliver Rapid and Measurable Return on Marketing Investments
The secret to consistently beating both profitability goals and competitors may sound simple — just
understand your customers better and faster than anyone else, and then target them more effectively
than anyone else. But with the scope and scale of marketing in the retail industry, delivering
meaningful, personal service to customers is a difficult task.
In the days of the community general store, shopkeepers knew their customers personally and could
tailor their offerings to create the most compelling offer at the right price, at the right time. They could
also consider complementary purchases based on the shopkeeper’s personal knowledge of a
customer’s likelihood to need and buy. That customer-centric view became logistically unfeasible or
impossible in the era of global mass marketing, and particularly difficult for retailers who reach
customers through remote channels. Nonetheless, customers still expect to be treated personally,
immediately and consistently.
How can a retail marketing organization determine the best possible set of offers to present, to which
customers, within the bounds of resource constraints, available offers and marketing goals?
With increased customer expectations and demand for an exact fit to requirements, it is increasingly
important to not only provide accurate insights about the customer, but to put that information within
reach of all contributors to the marketing process. Retailers must work faster and smarter to deliver
and track sophisticated, event-driven marketing communications with ever-tightening deadlines,
turning data about customers into knowledge that empowers everyone involved to make better
decisions.
Unfortunately, while information about customers is plentiful, actionable customer intelligence often
remains elusive. Customer data pours in from every conceivable channel, but assembling a coherent
picture of customers from all those puzzle pieces — a picture on which an organization can
confidently build a profitable marketing strategy — can be a formidable challenge.
Panorama Necto delivers fast, significant return on marketing investment by enabling retailers to
conduct measurable, integrated marketing campaigns; maximize customer profitability, acquisition
and retention; leverage existing investments in technology; and build a sustainable competitive
advantage through the creation of reliable, high-value customer intelligence.
Just a few of the new possibilities include: identifying specific groups of customers to promote to
them more effectively; accurately forecasting the sales bump that a specific promotion will have to
© Panorama Software 2011
optimize return on that promotion; identifying the characteristics of top-performing stores to develop
new retail locations; and developing, managing and measuring the effectiveness of new loyalty
program features.
The result is better service, improved item availability matched to customer expectations; more-
focused product promotions targeted at individual preferences, and improved information ? all
combining to strengthen the relationship between customer and retailer. Longer-term benefits include
lower customer retention costs, greater store visit frequency, and a marked increase in lifetime value
for each customer.
An Intelligent Retail Supply Chain
Inventory is the largest financial asset in retailing. As any retailer knows, the matter of offering the
right goods in the right store at the right time and at the right price sounds simple, but can be highly
complex. And when in-demand items are out of stock the result is lost customers and lost revenue.
That means selecting inventory assortment, allocating it to stores, and replenishing it efficiently to
create an attractive and memorable shopping experience is the heart of retailing. When an
organization can manage its inventory well, it can reduce capital costs and achieve success in a
crowded marketplace.
The process of buying inventory, moving it out to stores and effectively restocking it is called a “chain”
for a reason ? every part of the operation is inextricably linked, and all depend on timely, reliable
data about how products are performing.
But when each link in the supply chain gets its data from a different source, or keeps its data in
discrete silos, the result is multiple versions of the truth and a breakdown in cooperation between
those crucial links. The results of chronic supply chain problems are simple and highly visible ?
products not on the shelves, stock that’s out of season or warehouses full of overstock ? and they
can easily wipe out margins that are already razor thin.
Panorama Necto can ? in real-time ? process, analyze and report on a retail chain’s vast quantities
of POS data down the SKU level, then use it to customize assortments, replenishment, prices, and
quantities in the field.
© Panorama Software 2011
For starters, buyers receiving accurate up-to-date information on the performance of vendor brands,
SKUs, deliveries, and lead times can use BI to forecast how much inventory is needed to meet
demand through the season and track availability. At the next link, distributors can optimize
merchandise levels, minimize out-of-stocks, and manage inventory costs through item movement
analysis. And replenishers can use BI to automatically reorder goods from distribution centers and/or
vendors, saving merchants time and increasing return on assets.
Business intelligence tools won’t build you a miracle supply chain, but they can automate your
homegrown process and make it more efficient and effective than you ever thought possible.
© Panorama Software 2011
Panorama Software
Panorama Software helps companies grow revenues, reduce costs and improve corporate
performance by enabling social decision making and unlocking actionable insights contained within
their data.
Leading the Business Intelligence 3.0 revolution, Panorama Software offers a new generation of BI
solutions that introduces a unique way to connect data, insights, and people in the organization.
Panorama Necto™ is the first BI solution that leverages Social Decision Making and Automated
Insights to enable users gain insights more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater relevancy.
Necto end-to-end BI suite includes Analytics, Social BI, Automated Relevant Insights, Smart
Reporting, Dashboards/Workboards and integration with Microsoft Office/SharePoint. Necto is
designed to work on top of any data source - OLAP, Relational, Spreadsheets or In-Memory.
Founded in 1993, Panorama Software is the original developer of the OLAP technology that was
acquired my Microsoft in 1996, which was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated
into the SQL Server platform. Since that sale, Panorama has been a close and strategic Microsoft
partner, delivering the only Business Intelligence application that is specifically designed for the
Microsoft platform.
Panorama streamlines business operations through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise
BI solution for over 1,600 customers worldwide, including some of the world’s largest financial
services, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications and media companies. Panorama
has a wide eco-system of partners in 30 countries, and maintains offices throughout North America,
EMEA and Asia. To learn more about Panorama Software, please visit www.panorama.com.
Worldwide
164 Eglinton Avenue East
Suite #100
Toronto, ON M4P 1G4
Canada
Phone: +1.416.545.0990
Fax: +1.416.545.0877
United States
1230 Avenue of the Americas
Suite #7109
New York, NY 10020
USA
Phone: +1.877.709.5848
Fax: +1.877.709.5888
Europe
Devonshire House
66 Church Street,
Leatherhead, UK
KT22 8DP
Phone: + 44-137-222-4027
Fax: + 44-137-222-4028
Israel, Asia-Pacific
6, Raoul Wallenberg St.
5th Floor
Ramat Hachayal
Tel Aviv, 69719
Israel
Phone: +972.3.645.9777
Fax: +972.3.648.0085
doc_130167987.pdf
Optimize processes, reduce costs, and gain greater visibility into retail operations More than any other business driver, competition characterizes the retail industry.
Business Intelligence for Retail
Panorama Necto
TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER
© Panorama Software 2011
Optimize processes, reduce costs, and gain greater visibility into
retail operations
More than any other business driver, competition characterizes the retail industry. Globalization,
deflation, diversification of sales channels and, most of all, changing customer demands have merged
to create a cutthroat environment in which retailers struggle to turn a profit.
These profitability challenges involve both revenue and cost. Sales remain flat with many companies
not understanding customer behavior and buying habits well enough to make the right decisions
about product, price, promotion and placement. And without the ability to explore every facet of the
organization across business units and geographies, it can be a struggle to understand and manage
the costs required to do business.
In the old millennium, product and service were prime competitive differentiators. Excellence in
products and service is still essential, of course, but such attributes tend to only be differentiators for
short windows of time before competitors catch up. The only enduring way to stand apart is to have
better information ? the critical ingredient that enables a retailer to outmaneuver the competition
through a continuing flow of renewal and innovation. That means an enterprise’s information
management strategy can either be its most compelling asset or its most limiting deficit.
In a mobile society with a diverse customer base, retailers require daily or even real-time information
to act on customer needs quickly. Retailers can no longer gain essential intelligence by capturing
information in monthly or weekly reports like they did ten — or even five — years ago. Today,
customer needs are not easily detectable, nor are sales peaks and dips so easily predictable. To
maintain productivity and profitability, enterprises must leverage data and information as never before
in order to plan and analyze operations, discern shifting market demands, collaborate with suppliers,
and track consumer trends.
In response, leading retailers around the globe are redefining the way they do business with their
customers. Utilizing innovative new technologies, they are finding new ways to understand market
trends, new avenues for meeting consumer needs and preferences, and new opportunities to tailor
each shopping experience to match the expectations of every individual customer.
That’s where advanced business intelligence (BI) solution like Panorama’s Necto? which addresses
purchasing, profitability, marketing efforts, inventory and store management, and customer service ?
improves top- and bottom-line retailer performance. The power of BI extends across the enterprise to
integrate disparate infrastructure and applications, empower employees to make fast decisions,
© Panorama Software 2011
improve the transactional and informational flow, increase customer service and loyalty, and
streamline operations at both corporate and store levels.
It’s not surprising that in an Aberdeen Group report, 76% of retailers surveyed already have or plan to
use BI. It’s also no coincidence that 80% of best-in-class (BIC) retailers ? those who have
comparable year over year sales increases of greater than 3% ? use BI, compared to only 50% of
“laggards” (those whose sales are flat). Also telling, 70% of BIC retailers indicate C-level involvement
in BI data management, versus 58% for average performers and 50% for laggards.
Panorama Necto delivers the complete range of BI capabilities: reporting, analysis, scorecarding,
dashboards, business event management as well as data integration ? and turns data about
customers, merchandise and operations into knowledge. And that knowledge provides greater insight
into performance, empowering retailers to make more informed decisions, gain a competitive
advantage, strengthen customer and vendor loyalty, and improve profitability.
BI for retailers means the ability to quickly and accurately analyze vast amounts of sales and stock
data, and then transmit a response out through a highly distributed network of staff and locations.
There are a number of key areas in the retail industry where an advanced BI solution ? one that
provides immediate access to real-time actionable data ? becomes an extremely valuable
operational and decision-making tool.
Customer intelligence helps retailers identify, acquire, activate, serve and retain the most profitable
customers. Merchandise intelligence helps retailers drive revenue, protect margins and earn
customer loyalty with optimized merchandise plans, assortments, pricing, promotions, space plans
and allocations ? all driven by unparalleled demand forecasting and predictive analytics. Operations
intelligence lets retailers leverage organizational assets to trade with vendors and serve customers
more efficiently and profitably. Performance management solutions provide the ability to analyze,
forecast and maximize profits across the entire retail enterprise by monitoring cost and performance,
helping retailers drive disparate functional units toward common goals.
In an industry with fierce competition, low margins, blurring segments, multiple sales channels, and
high volatility, retailers can dramatically improve sales and operations through better, smarter use of
customer and product information. Panorama Necto closes the loop between strategy, corporate
enterprise systems, suppliers, in-store execution, and the familiar technologies already in the hands
of consumers. Based on proven technologies, this powerful BI solution dovetails with retail industry
best practices, enabling retailers to optimize processes, reduce costs, and gain greater visibility into
business conditions in order to make fast and accurate business decisions.
© Panorama Software 2011
Improve Customer and Store Profitability
Merchants can no longer base critical merchandising decisions on intuition or historical reports and
expect the desired results. Instead, retailers need a way to maximize the profitability of the
merchandising process while exceeding customer expectations ? a system that provides more
valuable information about demand, customer behavior, category performance and more. Most of all,
this information needs to be available from one source, so it can be accessed and used quickly to
make more profitable merchandising decisions.
But because the retail business is also so dynamic ? sales for one weekend could make or break an
entire month ? analysis systems must provide the ability for every level of a retail organization to
sense and respond quickly to any challenges that arise, to instantly assess victory or defeat and then
adapt for future benefit.
Traditionally, ideas about merchandizing and customer behavior have been forged using simplistic
query and reporting tools coupled with instinct and intuition. Optimized answers to these questions
have been all but impossible. In fact, too many retailers still rely on simple operational and transaction
data to determine future outcomes on the hope that hindsight can generate useful insight and
foresight. But knowing how many transactions took place is not the same thing as understanding why
they took place, which factors influenced the outcome, and how to optimize the result in the future.
Spreadsheets provide a rudimentary understanding of the business, but they can’t provide the kinds
of answers needed to elevate the retail organization into proactive, differentiated, sustainable
success.
Powerful business intelligence (BI) solutions like Panorama Necto enable retailers to analyze
transaction patterns based on past purchases and interactions, and then use that information to
influence future purchases. The results drive new levels of value by generating product purchase
correlations that enable retailers to anticipate the customer’s needs even before they are expressed.
This capability maximizes cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and it can enable smarter store
layouts that position key products based on the intentions of customers at different times of the day
and different days of the week.
Panorama Necto can power sophisticated market basket analysis, helping retailers understand what
items are likely to be purchased together (or not), primarily with the aim of identifying cross-selling
opportunities. The point-of-sale scanner produces transaction data, which can be loaded into a data-
warehousing environment to determine merchandising, product placement and shelving decisions.
Using BI tools, users can drill down the product dimension to automatically retrieve the associated
market basket summary associated with that product from the underlying relational data store.
© Panorama Software 2011
Amusingly, the most commonly cited example of market basket analysis is the finding that young
fathers buy diapers and six packs of beer Thursday nights, which may sound trivial, but in fact
enables appropriate placement of products for cross-selling and up-selling.
Pilot Travel Centers, which owns and operate over 270 combined retail, restaurant and fuel outlets in
40 U.S. states, previously depended on vendors’ reps for its only rudimentary market basket analysis,
but had no way to verify their claims. However with the launch of Panorama BI Solutions, together
with a new point-of-sale system, Pilot has begun its own market basket analysis and the results are
proving fruitful. For example, it has found that smokers often spend considerably more dollars when
buying cigarettes, enabling the organization of displays in a novel and more lucrative way.
Pilot is continuing its differential analysis, comparing results between different stores, between
customers in different demographic groups, between different days of the week, different seasons of
the year, etc. and expects investigating such differences to yield useful insights which will improve
company sales.
Operate at an Optimal Level of Performance
In order to compete and prosper, retailers today face a mandate to operate at an optimal level of
performance to meet financial and organizational expectations. This mandate is transforming the way
retail organizations do business.
Profitable execution in retail is all about the details ? from store execution to logistics and
distribution, payroll and manpower management, IT infrastructure, finances and non-inventory
supplies. The list of considerations is long, but intelligent use of working capital and management of
operating expenses ensures that top-line revenue and margin performance is not eroded by
inefficiency, incompetence or fraud before it reaches the bottom line.
But measuring and managing performance — metrics, plans and forecasts, and detailed actual
results — is not a simple proposition. The large volumes of data an organization amasses — POS,
merchandising, supply chain, financials, human resources, to name a few — often reside in disparate
legacy across the enterprise, and IT processes provide limited visibility into the business. It is
especially difficult given that there can be many tools used to analyze and report on the data, creating
further islands of information.
© Panorama Software 2011
Panorama Necto consolidates and leverages critical data, and turns it into meaningful information and
reports that everyone can use. Operational intelligence solutions from Panorama let retailers take
advantage of their organizational assets to sell and deliver merchandise and services.
Timely, accurate BI gives store managers access to real time information across an entire store’s
operations, enabling them to make more accurate decisions more quickly. And by automating many
back-office administrative functions, managers will be able to spend less time on administrative tasks
and significantly more time out on the floor, working with customers.
Managers are also empowered to make fast, accurate decisions about labor deployment, risk
management, product promotions, inventory control and much more. And sales associates can
improve customer interactions, increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and anticipate customer
needs. The results include enhanced customer satisfaction and greater store efficiency.
Panorama Necto can also look for patterns of fraudulent activity and then flag suspicious POS
transactions for closer examination. Taken one step further, it can generate alerts that notify store
manager whenever products aren’t driving expected gross margins so that the store manager can
check to see if the labor mix is correct, signage is appropriate, and inventory position is accurate. This
access to real-time store performance information will transform the store manager into an
empowered decision-maker who can help the store achieve higher levels of business performance.
In response to inconsistent management from store to store, Pilot Travel Centers implemented
Panorama as a key component of its intranet site “the Hub” to present and publish sales data for
budget and year-over-year comparison. The portal serves as a source of data from the VP of
Operations down to retail managers, who can now see whether they are hitting sales targets, meeting
budgets and breaking sales records ? all critical performance motivators.
The first phase of the implementation addressed Pilot’s deli sales ? hot dogs, soda, and coffee ?
and exploited the power of Panorama BI Solution, combined with the motivational ability of timely,
easy-to-understand, indisputable data. And the results were extraordinary.
By simply allowing managers an easy-to-use view of their sales, debits and national ranking, David
Clothier, Pilot’s Controller and Treasurer, said, “We will easily see, at minimum, a 2% improvement in
sales and a 1.5% improvement in margin, adding an additional $1.8 million to the bottom line. Those
results are linked directly to our enhanced reporting and analysis – we can identify sales,
performance and buying issues quickly and easily to act immediately.”
© Panorama Software 2011
Deliver Rapid and Measurable Return on Marketing Investments
The secret to consistently beating both profitability goals and competitors may sound simple — just
understand your customers better and faster than anyone else, and then target them more effectively
than anyone else. But with the scope and scale of marketing in the retail industry, delivering
meaningful, personal service to customers is a difficult task.
In the days of the community general store, shopkeepers knew their customers personally and could
tailor their offerings to create the most compelling offer at the right price, at the right time. They could
also consider complementary purchases based on the shopkeeper’s personal knowledge of a
customer’s likelihood to need and buy. That customer-centric view became logistically unfeasible or
impossible in the era of global mass marketing, and particularly difficult for retailers who reach
customers through remote channels. Nonetheless, customers still expect to be treated personally,
immediately and consistently.
How can a retail marketing organization determine the best possible set of offers to present, to which
customers, within the bounds of resource constraints, available offers and marketing goals?
With increased customer expectations and demand for an exact fit to requirements, it is increasingly
important to not only provide accurate insights about the customer, but to put that information within
reach of all contributors to the marketing process. Retailers must work faster and smarter to deliver
and track sophisticated, event-driven marketing communications with ever-tightening deadlines,
turning data about customers into knowledge that empowers everyone involved to make better
decisions.
Unfortunately, while information about customers is plentiful, actionable customer intelligence often
remains elusive. Customer data pours in from every conceivable channel, but assembling a coherent
picture of customers from all those puzzle pieces — a picture on which an organization can
confidently build a profitable marketing strategy — can be a formidable challenge.
Panorama Necto delivers fast, significant return on marketing investment by enabling retailers to
conduct measurable, integrated marketing campaigns; maximize customer profitability, acquisition
and retention; leverage existing investments in technology; and build a sustainable competitive
advantage through the creation of reliable, high-value customer intelligence.
Just a few of the new possibilities include: identifying specific groups of customers to promote to
them more effectively; accurately forecasting the sales bump that a specific promotion will have to
© Panorama Software 2011
optimize return on that promotion; identifying the characteristics of top-performing stores to develop
new retail locations; and developing, managing and measuring the effectiveness of new loyalty
program features.
The result is better service, improved item availability matched to customer expectations; more-
focused product promotions targeted at individual preferences, and improved information ? all
combining to strengthen the relationship between customer and retailer. Longer-term benefits include
lower customer retention costs, greater store visit frequency, and a marked increase in lifetime value
for each customer.
An Intelligent Retail Supply Chain
Inventory is the largest financial asset in retailing. As any retailer knows, the matter of offering the
right goods in the right store at the right time and at the right price sounds simple, but can be highly
complex. And when in-demand items are out of stock the result is lost customers and lost revenue.
That means selecting inventory assortment, allocating it to stores, and replenishing it efficiently to
create an attractive and memorable shopping experience is the heart of retailing. When an
organization can manage its inventory well, it can reduce capital costs and achieve success in a
crowded marketplace.
The process of buying inventory, moving it out to stores and effectively restocking it is called a “chain”
for a reason ? every part of the operation is inextricably linked, and all depend on timely, reliable
data about how products are performing.
But when each link in the supply chain gets its data from a different source, or keeps its data in
discrete silos, the result is multiple versions of the truth and a breakdown in cooperation between
those crucial links. The results of chronic supply chain problems are simple and highly visible ?
products not on the shelves, stock that’s out of season or warehouses full of overstock ? and they
can easily wipe out margins that are already razor thin.
Panorama Necto can ? in real-time ? process, analyze and report on a retail chain’s vast quantities
of POS data down the SKU level, then use it to customize assortments, replenishment, prices, and
quantities in the field.
© Panorama Software 2011
For starters, buyers receiving accurate up-to-date information on the performance of vendor brands,
SKUs, deliveries, and lead times can use BI to forecast how much inventory is needed to meet
demand through the season and track availability. At the next link, distributors can optimize
merchandise levels, minimize out-of-stocks, and manage inventory costs through item movement
analysis. And replenishers can use BI to automatically reorder goods from distribution centers and/or
vendors, saving merchants time and increasing return on assets.
Business intelligence tools won’t build you a miracle supply chain, but they can automate your
homegrown process and make it more efficient and effective than you ever thought possible.
© Panorama Software 2011
Panorama Software
Panorama Software helps companies grow revenues, reduce costs and improve corporate
performance by enabling social decision making and unlocking actionable insights contained within
their data.
Leading the Business Intelligence 3.0 revolution, Panorama Software offers a new generation of BI
solutions that introduces a unique way to connect data, insights, and people in the organization.
Panorama Necto™ is the first BI solution that leverages Social Decision Making and Automated
Insights to enable users gain insights more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater relevancy.
Necto end-to-end BI suite includes Analytics, Social BI, Automated Relevant Insights, Smart
Reporting, Dashboards/Workboards and integration with Microsoft Office/SharePoint. Necto is
designed to work on top of any data source - OLAP, Relational, Spreadsheets or In-Memory.
Founded in 1993, Panorama Software is the original developer of the OLAP technology that was
acquired my Microsoft in 1996, which was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated
into the SQL Server platform. Since that sale, Panorama has been a close and strategic Microsoft
partner, delivering the only Business Intelligence application that is specifically designed for the
Microsoft platform.
Panorama streamlines business operations through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise
BI solution for over 1,600 customers worldwide, including some of the world’s largest financial
services, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications and media companies. Panorama
has a wide eco-system of partners in 30 countries, and maintains offices throughout North America,
EMEA and Asia. To learn more about Panorama Software, please visit www.panorama.com.
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