Rapid-deployment solution for SAP Customer Activity Repository now available – Part 3

Successfully deploy in as little as 11 weeks!

My name is Ina Glaes and this is the third blog about our newest, retail specific package SAP HANA Customer Activity Repository rapid-deployment solution. The first part gave you some more general information about the package and the covered components. The second blog gave you some more insights about the pre-defined analytics regarding Inventory Visibility. And now you can learn more about Multichannel Sales Analytics and On-shelf Availability.

Multichannel Sales Analytics

Most retailers today operate different channels and their customers have high expectations of a uniform experience across the channels. Many retailers behind the scenes built very siloed systems to support these channels as they developed separately over time, with some even being outsourced to 3rd parties. In order to meet expectations and lower the overall cost of supporting these channels, SAP HANA Customer Activity Repository rapid-deployment solution provides real-time insight into sales performance and customer behavior across all channels by centralizing critical business data. Instant reports allow access to these powerful insights every time and everywhere.

The journey starts with the multi channel sales dashboard, being a best-practice four quadrant view. The first quadrant contains 12 KPI’s and highlighting one of them updates the trend and store hierarchy views in quadrants 2 & 3. The fourth quadrant contains a view of the top 10 items across channels. There are drop-down boxes across the top that enables the user to see just the slice of the business that they want to understand. For example, a marketing manager could select just the web channel for a particular division of merchandise and see the metrics versus both plan and last year.

Users can launch more detailed Webi views from the dashboard. The context of the store and merchandise hierarchies are passed into the Webi parameters, enabling a guided analysis to more detailed information, even down to the transactional level in real time.

This delivered Exploration view can be launched from the dashboard drop down or from the BI Launch Pad. Hovering over an area of the map will show the values of the corresponding data point. For ad hoc analysis just click the Explore button which will open the functionality to continue to drill deeper for details.

If you only focus on brick and mortar, you can also use the Point of Sales (POS) Flash Sales Dashboard, which has a very similar look and feel as the multi channel sales dashboard. It can be used to keep a daily pulse on sales, inventory and promotions in order to service the customer and drive sales performance. The regional and district managers are on the road visiting stores 90% of the time, so real-time mobile access is very important to this group. Daily POS Flash Dashboard – First thing in the morning out in the field via iPad.  VP Store Operations looks at the daily flash scorecard that roles up all stores chain-wide. He is able to see if there are any problem areas that need attention with the ability to drill into the details. He is able to get a more interactive experience with a dashboard. Selecting a KPI updates the other quadrants and Top 10 articles for all stores are available immediately and can further filter down to a particular store’s Top 10.

Once an article of interest is selected in the fourth quadrant, a more detailed Webi report can be launched directly from the dashboard by clicking on the Webi icon . Webi composite view of chart and table information showing article unit quantity sales volume quantity over the past 3 days. The table shows sales value as well as discount and promotion sales values.

Clicking on a particular value in the chart will filter the table to just show the data for that hour of business, a very handy ad hoc exception analysis.

This is an optional part in the package, so you can decide if you want to implement it or leave it out.

On-Shelf Availability

Another  optional part is about on-shelf availability. SAP HANA Customer Activity Repository rapid-deployment solution includes On-Shelf Availability algorithms that you can use to detect and visualize out-of-shelf situations in stores. With that you can observe on-shelf availability KPI’s to determine hot spots in respect to on-shelf availability, e.g. stores, suppliers, week days and to derive appropriate measures targeting improved on-shelf availability. The package provides the configuration of the On-Shelf Availability algorithm and explains the results, so that you can take further actions to optimize your business. The process consists of the following three steps:

• Run Intra-week pattern analyzer to determine the intra-week pattern, which is a model for the regular intra-week and intra-day sales fluctuations of single items or categories
• Run estimation step to calculate the model parameters for the base estimation, to determine the effect of the trend and the sales influencing factors based on the intra-week pattern.
• Run analysis step for a specified period to determine the time intervals in which the product location was probably out-of-shelf.

The package doesn’t include visualization for these results, but link you to a template which you can use as a base for the implementation project.

Let me summarize. This rapid-deployment solution helps you to transform your enterprise from product to customer centric via providing a preconfigured solution covering several use cases like POS Data Transfer & Audit (Covered by Engineered Service “Implementation of point of sales data transfer and auditing“), Inventory Visibility, Multichannel Sales Analytics and On-shelf Availability. It gives you a unified view on demand, sales, stock and customer information across all channels with the help of pre-built analytics and enables you to find fast your golden nuggets in the ocean of customer data across all channels.

Please also take a few minutes to check the following video featuring Lori Mitchell-Keller, Head of Global Retail Industry Business Unit, talking about SAP Customer Activity Repository and the related package.